First of all, the “funniest headline award” belongs to Fox News: “Trump trolls liberals with unexpected plan to meet their favorite comic” was the header on their homepage this morning.
Bill Maher is absolutely NOT the liberals’ favorite comic!
Maybe it was true during his “Politically Incorrect” run on ABC or when he was a seven-figure Obama donor, but that was a long time ago.
Today? Liberals hate him. He’s a turncoat — a traitor! — because his personal beliefs occasionally stray from liberal orthodoxy.
What’s truly hilarious is how much our country has shifted. When Maher first hosted a network TV show, he was the most liberal man in the mainstream media! From 1993 through 2002, Maher was America’s only network host who (vocally) supported drug legalization, same-sex marriages, animal rights, atheism — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. (Which Maher is convinced is melting: He’s also a leading proponent of global warming alarmism.)
"What is with Republicans and the environment? They never waver in their commitment to do nothing." – @BillMaher #RealTime pic.twitter.com/Zf9ERG1VS7
— Real Time with Bill Maher (@RealTimers) February 2, 2019
Liberals used to love Maher because he was a powerful weapon against the right. Until a certain orange-hued billionaire descended the golden escalator and announced his presidential bid on June 16, 2015, the Republican Party was flat-out lousy at the “ridicule game.” When it came to snarks, snubs, and snide remarks, the GOP trailed far behind the Democrats.
Don’t underestimate the political power of ridicule! Wielded correctly, it can transform a serious, capable man into a pathetic laughingstock.
A handful of conservatives were adept at the “ridicule game.” (Rush Limbaugh, I’m looking at you.) But for the most part, conservatives didn’t traffic in those sorts of attacks. Instead, we tended to mimic men like William F. Buckley. (To be fair, Buckley could be devastatingly snarky when he wanted, but he usually did it with an erudite, gentlemanly flourish that masked his meanness. The Gore Vidal SNAFU notwithstanding, I mean.)
Donald Trump was the first GOP presidential candidate to beat the [EXPLETIVE] out of the left at the “ridicule game.” They came after him with a sledgehammer; he responded with an ICBM. It got so bad that the liberals literally had to conspire to ban him from social media — and that STILL didn’t work!
They’ve been fighting Trump for a decade. At this point, they’re exhausted! Trump has outworked, outhustled, and out-snarked the unsnarkable left.
But he’s not the only one who’s exhausted. Bill Maher has been getting beaten up, too.
A generation ago, he was the most liberal man on American TV. But now? He’s hated and despised by radical Zoomers! Questions are popping up on Quora, wondering why far leftists dislike him. If you venture on left-leaning social media sites like Reddit and Bluesky, you’d be blown away by the depth of liberal vitriol directed at Bill Maher.
Alas, Maher has committed the unforgivable crime of liberal heresy: He believes that some regulations are unnecessary, that this pronoun insanity is stupid, and that gender is much more than just a “social construct.”
And he’s not backing down:
“It’s not me who’s changed, it’s the left, who is now made up of a small contingent who’ve gone mental. And a large contingent who refuse to call them out for it,” he said in a January monologue titled “How the Left was Lost” on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
“People sometimes say to me, ‘You know, you didn’t used to make fun of the left as much.’ Yeah, because they didn’t give me so much to work with,” he said. Now he goes after the left for “woke” ideology and “cancel culture.”
During the pandemic, he often sided with conservatives, criticizing the media for misleading the public by reporting higher hospitalization numbers and positioning himself against the mask mandates. After a bout of COVID-19, he appeared on his show and said, “I never was sick. I felt nothing,” Maher added, the vaccine “probably” helped him avoid the severe symptoms.
And now Mr. Maher is going to Washington to dine in the White House with Donald Trump, Kid Rock, and (maybe) Dana White:
We’re certainly living in interesting times.
Maher, of course, was once involved in a $5 million lawsuit against Trump about whether or not Trump’s mother was an orangutan. (Which just might be the weirdest sentence I’ve ever written.) Anyway, good luck to future history teachers who’ll have to tell that story with a straight face.
According to Maher, his “street cred” as an unabashed Trump critic is part of the reason why he’s so excited to break bread with the president:
“I’m doing it because first of all, it was presented as… maybe this is a beginning to heal America. Now, I don’t have some sort of complex where I think I can heal America, I can’t,” Maher told Cuomo. “Let’s get that clear. I’m not going to be healing America. But if two guys who’ve been at each other for so long — I mean, it’s kind of a Nixon to China thing. I have the credentials.”
Of course, there’s a non-zero chance that this is all a setup — that Maher plans to parlay his intimacy with Trump into a new line of leftwing attacks. But I don’t think so.
Maher possesses something most people in the media would kill for: Undisputed bona fides as an independent thinker.
And nowadays, that’s worth its weight in gold.
“But they also respect me because I’m honest about the woke train to crazy town,” the 69-year-old comic declared. “And I don’t shrink from that. And I’ve also lost a lot of fans for that. The woke people have left the building, and I’m willing to make that sacrifice. But it does give you a certain credibility.”
Indeed, it does. And if the dinner goes well, it might lead to much more than that, too.
We’re still waist-deep in a national realignment. Key demos are shifting (mostly to the right), and it’s unclear how it will all end. But in a binary political system like ours, there are only two games in town: Republican or Democrat.
It's gotta be one or the other.
And a guy like Bill Maher would be a VERY useful weapon against the left.
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