O'REILLY My ideology is that I'm not in any crew at all. Anybody who thinks that NPR and PBS are fair brokers of information is a lunatic. They're not. I'm not at the altar of socialism. They'll kill you. They have the power to kill you.

O’REILLY Hey, Bill O'Reilly here. Welcome to We'll Do It Live. Now, we're out of format this week for a number of reasons. I had a medical thing I had to deal with, and then going back and forth to Eastern Long Island, where I had to do stuff out there. Anyway, you don't care about that, but we might have something better than a guest. And we will go back to our regular format next week. So I want to talk about Bill Maher tonight. And I have a long history with Mr. Maher. And he said something on NPR. He did a podcast that's very interesting. And I want to analyze it for you in this long form we call it, podcast, you may call it. We'll do it live. Now, I was on Maher's program last December, it went pretty well for me, and I suspect with my book coming out, Confronting America, that I'll be back on with him sometime in the fall. He's in LA, I'm in New York, so it's not an easy gig, and I don't want to put him on a satellite unless I have to, I'd much rather do it in person.

O'REILLY So, anyway, he goes on NPR, and you need to know a little bit about this. So I first ran into Maher when he, shortly after 9-11, the attack, was fired by ABC, okay? And he was fired because he said that the terrorists were not cowards, and he was calibrating that the terrorists themselves, who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and then out in Pennsylvania. Knew they were going to die and were willing to die for their cause of Wahhabism or whatever nutty thing they embraced. So they couldn't be cowards because they're willing to give up their lives. That's what his thinking was. My thinking is a little bit different that if you're brainwashed, if you subject yourself to an ideology of murder, which these people did, and it goes on today, terrorism and murder, then, you're a coward because terrorists kill innocent people. You're not in a foxhole. However, I understood Maher's point, and I didn't like the fact that ABC fired him. You know, if you want to bring me on to debate him about it, more than happy to do it, or anybody who opposes Maher's stance. That's how you handle it. You just tell him you're fired because we don't like what you say, and the sponsors are mad. Okay, the sponsors are always mad, and they'll get over it. So anyway, I did stick up for Maher, and he wrote me a nice note about it. You know, I thought it was a respectful thing to do, and that was it. And then I've run into him a few times over the years. He got increasingly a left wing which departs from my ideology of fact-finding. See, my ideology is I'm not in any crew at all. I want to know what happened, why it happened, and how it affects you and me. That's my ideology, and wherever that's going to lead me, I'm going there. I have, in the last nine years, been able to prosper with that ideology because I don't work for the corporate media anymore. I don't have some pinhead telling me, oh, you know, the audience might be upset. I don't care. I don't care, okay? And Maher doesn't care either. So his program on HBO has been on for 24 years or whatever, and it's successful. And he really doesn't care about what ABC wants or the sponsors want, kind of respect that.

O'REILLY Anyway, let's get to the matter at hand. So, Maher goes on NPR's YouTube operation. Now, I am not an NPR fan, okay, because I did an interview with a woman named Terry Gross years ago, and she has a popular program on NPR. It was the most ridiculous interview I think I've ever done. I mean, the woman had, it was pure ideology, and at one point I said to her, hey, look, I'm not a conservative or whatever you want me to be or think I am. So you're like debating the wall here. We know you're a far-left progressive, and that's fine. Now, if you have questions of facts, if you have questions of history, more than happy, but this is nonsense, what you're pulling here. This is Terry Gross. And so, why would I bother with that? And PBS, same way, same exact way, almost 100% down the line. We call them limousine liberals in Manhattan, but they're really hardcore progressives. So, Maher used to be in that crew. He's very, very left-wing. And that's what Hollywood is. He lives in Hollywood, as I mentioned. All right. So he was embedded there. And at that time, if you want to be a loon on the left or the right, your perfect right under the Constitution to do that. That's the way you want to live, go ahead. I don't care. You're hurting people, then I step in. So, I kind of didn't lose track of Maher, I knew what he was doing. But then he turned a little bit because the progressives have gotten so crazy with the Me Too stuff and the banishing people and the canceling and the you've got to do it my way and Nancy Pelosi threatening everybody in Congress. If you don't vote my way, we cut off your money, on and on, and Maher didn't like that. And so he turned a little bit. He didn't lose a lot of currency. Remember, he's on HBO. He's not on linear TV. So he goes into this podcast from NPR on July 15th. All right. He talks to a guy named Steve Inskeep, whom I don't know. And I'm gonna analyze a good part of the conversation for you in our Do It Live broadcast. Let's begin with Maher going after NPR's audience. Roll it.

MAHER Your audience is going to love this, by the way.

INSKEEP The audience is a little more diverse than you might think.

MAHER I mean, I'm surprised you even had me on. Because I just think of this place as so different than but it used to be, and like I would...What I always want people to do, but it's so hard to get people to do these days, is just engage with the argument. You can hate me whatever for whatever your reasons. You know, I'm too old. I'm whatever I am. Are you engaging with the arguments? Tell me if I'm wrong about something, and then we're gonna be cool, but that's not what either extreme does in this country anymore. And I, maybe I'm wrong, but I think of this place as like on the far extreme of the left.

INSKEEP Well, maybe, maybe there's a little more variety in who we talk to than you might have been told.

MAHER Who you talk to is different than what people believe.

O'REILLY Maher's not wrong. NPR lost its government funding. Trump didn't like them. Okay, we know that. And so did PBS, because they are. It's boring to me. Boring. Okay, there's nothing on there that I want to listen to because I know what they're going to say on what they are going to do. They never surprise you. It's right down the line, and other news operations are the same way. They know who their audience is. Every organization okay on television and radio takes research. They pay for research, and the research tells them who is watching? And what kind of people they are. Okay, so are they progressive watching? Are they conservatives watching? And the problem is that the management gets hold of this research, and they pay a lot of money for it. And then they tell their people, hey, don't go against the orthodoxy. Okay, most people who watch us are progressive, so we're gonna give them progressive soup every day. That's what Maher is saying, and he's right. Anybody who thinks that NPR and PBS are fair brokers of information is a lunatic. They're not. And they don't even have to compete for money because they're donation-driven now. Okay, and it has infected all of the news agencies, every single one of them on television. Everyone plays to its perceived choir, its audience. Okay. So when Maher is telling this guy, Inskeep, look, I'm surprised I'm even here because I don't spout across the board progressive tenets. I'm not at the altar of socialism. But the PBS credit, they did book them, but they booked them for other reasons, just to get a little publicity. The last time anybody heard NPR do anything, never.

O’REILLY Now the second soundbite is President Trump, so this is a complicated relationship. Now, Trump is very sensitive to all criticism, all right? I get away with it a little bit, but he does not like to be disparaged, the president. Most politicians are like that, but they don't say it. They don't go after the disparagers. Trump does. That's the big difference. I mean, Harry Truman, your head would blow off. I have letters written by Harry Truman about the press. Oh my God. Teddy Roosevelt, even though way back then you didn't have the electronic media, they hated it. They hated the media, but they wouldn't come out and say it. Trump does. All right. And then Trump gets vengeance or tries to on the people that he perceives are trying to hurt him. And there are plenty of those. Now, more... His instinct, and I'm taking this from watching him, not speaking with him, is not to like Donald Trump because he's, the president's undisciplined and he does things off the cuff that can be unsettling. But Maher will give Trump credit on occasion. So, therefore, the president invited Trump. President invited Maher to a dinner at the White House, which is a great honor. Even if you don't like Trump, this is the White House, okay, and you respect the office. And Maher went to the dinner, and they got along okay. I know the guy who put this together, and it went all great, but then when Maher went back to Hollywood and jabbed Donald Trump a few times, the relationship soured again. So this was a topic on the NPR podcast. Go.

INSKEEP Why do you think you would play a crazy person on TV? He has that choice.

MAHER Well, he is a crazy person in the extent that he definitely has a form of Tourette syndrome. He just blurts out whatever is on his mind, often. It's funny, he's both, at the same time, the most full of shit person and also the most honest.

INSKEEP But just, there's something different about the mind that does that.

MAHER Yeah, he just speaks his interior monologue, which is just, you know, that is a certain type of mental disorder. But it seems to come out when he feels in any way attacked, which is like outside of his comfort zone. You know, what can I tell you? I mean, I just found a very different person. You know the people who attack me have no argument. They just have a feeling. Their feeling is I never want to come in second in a I hate Donald Trump the most contest. Boring, okay. Nobody has been harder on Donald Trump. That's why the dinner happened to begin with. It was sort of a Nixon to China thing, you know.

O'REILLY So, notice the question from Mr. Inskeep that started that portion, why do you think he would play a crazy person on TV? Is that an opinion? I guess it's an opinion, it's not really a question. Because a lot of Americans, 77 million of them, admire the candor. They like the fact that President Trump speaks his mind and goes after what they perceive as bad people. So that's not crazy when you're re-elected another time after you serve your first term. That's effective. 77 million voted for him. Okay, but to Inskeep, the interviewer, Trump's crazy because Inskeep is used to Barack Obama or Kamala Harris, you know, or these people, the standard politicians who will say what they're told to say in a way that is as least offensive as they can make it. That's what Steve, I don't like that myself. Now, does the president go over the line? Yeah, yeah, I go over to the line sometimes. All right, he does. He gets frustrated, he gets tired, he gets fed up with certain people. ABC News is his big target, CNN close second because in and out, day in and day out, they are pounding the man, pounding, and pounding, and pounding and pounding. Hey, I went through it. I know exactly how Donald Trump feels. Exactly, and your instinct is to lash, and I have. And Trump wins a lot of that. Colbert vanished, vaporized, okay? Kimmel on the ropes. He wins a lot by the assault.

O'REILLY So this is not some crazy person on TV, as NPR would have you believe. Now, to Steve Inskeep and the NPR management, Trump is crazy. Because number one, they don't like what he does. They don't like his policies. And number two, he's saying stuff that sometimes isn't true, misleading. Emotional, whatever it may be. So he's crazy. So dismiss him. But Maher is smart enough not to dismiss him. Now, the line about the mental disorder. It's not a mental disorder, Bill. And if I go on his program in the fall, I'm going to talk to him about this. Trump, this is not a mental disorder, this is real. It's real that the president of the United States is attacked every day, every day, by a media that loathes him. That is reality. And when he started his political life, I was the first interview. You may remember that, okay? When he came down the stairway or the escalator to Trump Tower, he pivoted and went back up into the room where I was waiting for him. We did the interview. And I never thought he'd win. I never thought he'd win. I told him. I said, you're never gonna win. He first told me, late 2015, we're at a Knicks game, Madison Square Garden. We're sitting there, it was him and me. And he said, you know, I'm thinking about running for president. And I went, of what country? Bolivia, are you gonna buy a golf course or what are you going to do? I never, ever, because I knew him so well, I knew Donald Trump so well that I understood the pressures, because I wrote a book called Confronting the Presidents, on all of these men. There's enormous pressure on them every single day. And I never thought that Trump would be able to handle the pressure in a way that forwarded the good of the country. But he has. I mean, you can run down the line. The border seal is his biggest achievement. But that economy isn't bad. And that's not an easy thing to do when you've got crazy Putin, you've got Iran, you've got a million things going on with China. It's not easy. But, when he started, Donald Trump, his political campaign, he just destroyed Jeb Bush and all the others. You remember on that debate stage, just cut them down, little Marco, lyin' Ted, and they're all like, what? Nobody has ever done this. That's literally true. Nobody, no politician running for president, ever done it.

O'REILLY Not a mental disorder. It was a calculation. With a mental disorder, Tourette's or whatever Maher is assigning to President Trump, it would have blown right up. But it didn't. Because there were so many millions of Americans fed up with the standard politician. That's why Biden had to hand it off to Harris, and they got waxed. And both of them, you know, come on, Joe Biden? Kamala Harris? I mean, these are people that they don't problem-solve, you know, what are we having for dinner? So I think that Maher makes a big mistake when he assigns this as a mental disorder or Tourette's or some kind of thing, like it almost diminishes the skill set. That Trump brings to the debate and the deal-making process. He brings a skill set. It's different from everybody else's. It doesn't work all the time, hasn't worked with Iran yet, okay, but it works a lot. Now, the final soundbite gets a little personal because Maher is talking about Americans, and there are millions of them who just simply cannot accept opposing points of view. Roll it.

MAHER It's always, I think, better to engage and to feel like, oh, this is a person who at least has the respect to listen to my bull****. Because what they, what the right wing hates the most about the left is their condescending attitude. And I don't blame them. They, the left has this attitude like, and this is true of the Trump dinner. You are just too deplorable even to break bread with. That really gets them. And I don't blame the feeling, the feeling they have about that. You know, talk to them. As I always say, everybody's a monster till you talk to them.

O'REILLY And that remains a huge component of the Democratic Party, this arrogance that we know better, okay, that our strategies are noble, and MAGA and the Republicans are evil. This is what they push. Now, I've interviewed a lot of high-profile liberals in my career. Most of them, when they come in to talk with me, are respectful. Some of them aren't, you remember Barney Frank and all that kind of stuff. But I would say half, 50% of the liberals that I know personally as human beings are as arrogant as you could possibly be. The word is supercilious. So if you don't agree with them, then just get out of here. In fact, the younger people, younger Americans, say under the age of 35, they don't even, they won't even associate. You can't even go out on a date, right? You've got to pass a political litmus and social test for these people to even consider you as a human being, to even consider having a conversation with you. That's how arrogant they are.

O'REILLY Now, I'm trying to think back in history, have we ever gone into that kind of situation as a country? Have we ever seen that before? It's murky. The Civil War, you certainly had southern people, mostly, who, if you didn't believe in enslaving human beings, that you were the devil, and I'm willing to lose my life to protect the enslavement of human beings. Staggering. Think about it, step back, staggering. But it was there. And then you add the people, Ku Klux Klan, all of those people who said, you know, we're going to persecute fellow human beings, fellow Americans, because they're all in America, okay, because of their skin color. We'll hang them, we'll deny them the right to vote, we will deny them jobs. They can't sit in the same bus lane. What is that? You know, that kind of irrationality, you just look at it, and you go, what? So we have had that kind of movement here in America, but it hasn't been as bad as most other countries. Most other countries will slit your throat, okay? Here we had one big one, the Civil War, a million dead on both sides. But we're not usually like that. But this growing progressive movement, which is really a communist movement, and if you watch the No Spin News, you know I'm documenting this communist stuff. I'm not just spouting it. I'm documenting him. A guy like Mayor Mamdani is desperately seizing control of the means of production in New York City. He wants the government to run everything. That's his goal. That's communist. And at the same time, Mamdani does not want to put criminals away. So public safety is absolutely cratering here. Now that, in the past, has not been a communist dictum. You got out of line with Stalin or Mao or Ho Chi Minh or any of them, you're done.

O'REILLY Even today, if you go to China, you spit on the floor, you can be taken and will be taken and charged with crimes against the people, spitting on the floors. Can get you taken out of society in Beijing. I saw it when I was over there. It's usually not attached, soft on crime, to the communist movement. It is usually totalitarians will control antisocial behavior. There is no arrogance on the part of Xi or Putin or any of these other Martinets, the mullahs. And the reason there isn't any arrogance is because they'll kill you. They have the power to kill you without any due process. Did you know there are vans in China? Big vans that go from town to town, and execute people convicted of serious crimes against society. The van rolls into town, cops bring you out, they gas you or whatever they do, and that's it. Did you know that? It still exists. So the communist leadership around a country doesn't have to be arrogant. They'll blow the hell out of you. But here, the arrogance on the part of the left is growing, and that is going to hurt the Democratic Party in the midterm elections, because the thinking is going to be and a lot of things are going to happen. So people go, oh, can you predict it, O'Reilly, what's going to happen? I can't predict anything, it's two and a half months, all right. Iran might surrender. The economy is doing well now, it might double. How can I predict? Okay, gas might plummet once the Iran thing gets behind us, if it ever does. All right, so I can't predict anything other than the Bruce Springsteens of the world, the Robert De Niros, how arrogant are these people? Even Mick Jagger, Mr. Arrogance, says they're arrogant. Okay, come on. Americans don't like that. They don't. Now, on the right, you've got a certain amount of that, too. That arrogance that, you know, America, right or wrong, and we know best, and if you're a liberal, we don't want to talk to you, but it's nothing like the growing progressive movement in the USA.

O'REILLY So I suspect that Maher understands all that. He's a Cornell grad, well-educated, well-read. He's not, you know, Jimmy Kimmel. He follows what's happening. And I suspect that he himself understands this arrogance primarily because it affects him directly. So, he has complained that when he tries to book a liberal guest, then they won't come on his program because they don't want to answer any questions. I'm not going to answer that question from that O'Reilly or that Maher. I am not going to do that. That's arrogance. And Maher didn't like that. That's the seed of that.

O'REILLY Are you being lied to? They tell you to max out your 401k and IRA, and then they make you beg to use your own money. It is time to get the truth and discover a better way to grow and protect your money. Bank on yourself is the proven retirement plan alternative that banks and Wall Street desperately hope you will never hear about. You get guaranteed growth, tax-free retirement income, and peace of mind. You can get a free report that reveals how you can bank on yourself and access your money in retirement. Enjoy guaranteed growth, have more control over your money. A Bank On professional will answer any of your questions. Just go to bankonyourself.com/bill, take back control of your financial future. Bankonyourself.com/bill.

O'REILLY Now, the final point is here, that there are only a few people in this country that hold sway anymore in the public arena. Very, very few. Most of the pundits are dependent upon sensationalism. They call it clicks, you know, the thing on social media, they'll say something outrageous, and hopefully people go in and see what they have. Rush Limbaugh, the late Rush Limmbagh, he started on radio a cult of people who wanted to hear what he had to say. And he was entertaining, and he would drop a lot of stuff that people didn't know about, and he built up a colossal audience and made a fortune, right? I started it on TV, and if you don't believe me, ask Ted Koppel because Ted came on and accused me of destroying the whole television news industry, which I may have done, but in a good way. Because I opened it up to everybody's voice. And when I did the factor on the Fox News channel, we would have as many liberals as conservatives. I wanted that. I wanted that robust debate. We don't do as many guests now on the No Spin News, but I always am looking for the opposition to tell me where I'm wrong. That's entertaining news. That's the way analysis should be presented. I'm not a hard news guy anymore. I used to be, but my opinions are based on hard news. So you can ask my staff, which is excellent, everything's got to be backed up. You can't just send me, We're going to do this story, and this is what happened. Why? How do you know? Who's saying it? That kind of thing, because I can't be in a position, being an independent operator, to make mistakes.

O'REILLY You know, so Limbaugh, he had the radio thing, I had the television thing, more than 20 years. And now I have the YouTube thing, which is going to be, probably is already, way more powerful than linear TV. Because the reach is just phenomenal, goes everywhere. And I'm able to do what I want to do because I'm the boss. And I'm using all of my experience to mold commentary that's honest and makes sense. And my new book, you guys are going to like this, Confronting America: What Has to Change, this is way out of the ideological sphere. It'll be out September 15th. Now, Maher himself, I don't know the dynamics inside his program. I don't know, you know, I mean, we get calls, and this producer here does, but I suspect that Maher is calling most of the shots. He does have a team of writers. You know, I don't, I write everything I do, I don't have any writers. But he has a team, he does comedy and all of that. So maybe he's got five or six people in the room, and they're fashioning what he wants to say in his monologue. But I suspect that Maher is pretty much a free agent, HBO is not going to march in there, as I said earlier in the broadcast here, and tell him what to say or do. Maher's not that kind of guy, and I respect that. Not everybody, but so many people are like that now. And I can tell within 30 seconds whether I'm getting an honest look or I'm in a parrot. All right, and so, the left, NPR, getting back to that interview, lost a big ally when Maher defected. And he defected more because of style than substance. So I'll submit to you that if the election for president were tomorrow and the Democrats put up anybody who can make a point, that Maher would vote for that person, and not Trump, okay? Could be wrong, but I doubt it. His sympathies still lie in that area. He lives again in Hollywood, and in Hollywood it's a monolith. You go away from the progressives, and their arrogance will try to bring you down. Not only will they not associate, they'll try to ruin you out there. They'll try to ruin you, your family, you, everything else. It's frightening, but that's what communism is.

O'REILLY Final point here. So I take this time, We'll Do It Live, to do these interviews that we did and have been very successful. And I didn't know whether they were going to be or not. I'm not a podcast kind of guy or anything like that. I don't live in that world. But they've been very successful, and we really thank the people who have submitted. You know, we did a last major interview with Lindsey Graham, the late senator, and that's on BillOReilly.com if you want to see the same thing. If you want to see the whole thing, I should say. But we have been very, very successful. And I don't like to depart from that format. So I'd rather be talking to Bill Maher about all this himself, but we just couldn't work that out. Logistically, but I thought it was important because there is something going on in America that most people have no clue about. This progressive, communistic movement hasn't caught on in most places, but it has in the big urban centers. San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Boston, New York, D.C. It's caught on. And tens of millions of dollars being pumped into candidates who are communists, who want to control the means of production. They don't want you to have your say. They want a total system. They think capitalism is a crime. How many times did Bernie Sanders say the oligarchs, the corrupt oligarchs, how many times? When they say stuff like that, believe them. I think Maher knows that. I think he knows. He hasn't really addressed it, about how far these people have come so quickly. Think back. Five years ago, no mayor Mamdani, okay, couldn't happen. But Bernie Sanders, he's the godfather of this movement. And then George Soros, still pumping that money out with his son Alex up in Westchester County, New York, still pumping that out, okay? That combination, they control the media, news media, they control Hollywood, they can control a lot of what you see on social media. Okay, their candidates that they select are well-funded, millions of dollars going into an election for district attorneys. Never happened before. This coordinated effort is building.

O'REILLY Now, Trump's a bulwark. He sees it. Is he going to make a big deal out of it? I don't know. He's got other problems around. Iran, we've got to get this thing settled, the economy, lower prices. He's got to pay attention to that. The president does, okay? But he sees it because this is what he does. He analyzes what's happening, and then he reacts to the reality of the situation. And believe me, I've known the guy for 35 years, and I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with him. So I know how he operates, what's important to him. Maher, I'm looking forward to talking to him about my book, my new book. I don't know how he's gonna feel about it. There's a lot of anti-drug stuff in that, and he's a big pro-drugs guy. Drugs are really, really bad for everybody, for the country, really bad. And I make a big deal out of that. But I do other things that he, I think, is gonna respond to in a positive way, but who knows. So, summing up, NPR was smart to get Maher on the show. NPR revealed itself as being an arrogant, progressive organization, but we all knew that. Maher acquitted himself pretty well, I thought, explained why he believes what he believes and what's going on with the arrogance thing, which is important because people do listen to him. And that's why I'm taking the time on We'll Do It Live to go through this. Now you can reach me at Bill@BillOReilly.com if you want to add anything or dissent, and we'd love that. Bill@BillOReilly.com and it's a shout out, I hate that cliché, but shout out to YouTube. Thank you very much. Because you have really advanced the cause of freedom, in my opinion, all throughout the United States of America. We will see you next week.