Bill Clinton On ‘Conan’: Dictators Try To Abolish Line Between Fact And Fiction
President Bill Clinton visited Conan O’Brien during his week of shows from New York’s Apollo Theater..
President Bill Clinton visited Conan O’Brien during his week of shows from New York’s Apollo Theater and talked about how much has changed in the country since he was elected POTUS and O’Brien was named host of NBC’s Late Night.
On the bright side, the country is more diverse, he began.
“The thing that’s not so good is that we’re in the middle of – this transition of how we get our information and how we communicate,” POTUS 42 continued.
People making stuff up on the Internet need to knock it off, Clinton said, because we’re voting for people who are going to be elected to jobs in which they will make decisions that have real consequences in our lives.
“The Dictators Club in the world – and there’s a bunch of them – they want two things,” Clinton said: “Nuclear weapons, because they feel like they can never be dislodged no matter how much people hate them if they’ve got nuclear power. And they want to abolish the line between fact and fiction and truth and lie. Because they figure if you don’t know what’s true, and you don’t think you can ever know that, pretty soon everybody will accept the fact that democracy is no longer possible.”
That rattled O’Brien. “Are you talking about foreign countries or here? Because that chilled me to the bone for a second.”
Clinton did not immediately answer.
“You just said a lot by saying nothing,” O’Brien said.
“Look at the effort here to disenfranchise voters – to make it harder for young people, people of color, the elderly and infirm who are poor and vulnerable,” Clinton finally responded.
“The reason there is no immigration reform is because people who are against it are afraid it would adversely affect their electoral prospects. When the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act it made a terrible mistake because it unleashed all these efforts to basically shrink the electorate.”
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