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Reaction
An international anti-fascist show run by a Scandinavian nerd, a Slavic alcoholic and an American unc that takes you to the darkest corners of the internet to help you understand the footsoldiers of online right-wing mobilization - content creators.
Reaction
Episode 12 - Bill Maher
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Everyone fucking hates Bill Maher. And he has long represented the smug and condescending coastal liberal who looks down on the Hoy Peloy as undersexed, superstitious scum, and has been a feature of our TV networks and premium cable channels. His stand-up career never really took off, but he was handed television gigs. That's how it used to be for like mediocre white men. You go to the comedy closet, you bomb, and before you know it, you were on fucking network television. Yeah, now we do podcasts. Yeah, but no one's hiring my ass. I'm doing it myself. I'm not getting a one million dollar development deal for my podcast. I'm not from Pod Save America. Shout outs. Shout outs, yeah, we would love to come on. One of the greatest shows ever made. Yeah, definitely. Crooked Media. We're we're all we're all about it. So he started out on Comedy Central, and then he eventually transitioned to ABC and HBO. And they have kept him on the air inexplicably for over 30 years. And he even had a feature film, Religious, that was the peak of the Reddit atheism craze that mocked the very idea of religious belief.
SPEAKER_02I've come today to the village of Cyrin Abbas in southern England to show you something completely different. It's in the shape of a giant naked man with a sizable erection. Well, sizable for England. Some people think that this means that there is a giant actually buried under that hill. Others think it has something to do with crop circles or ancient space visitors or druids. But nobody really knows. And that's what I find fascinating about this, is that it doesn't really mean anything. The locals have been maintaining it for centuries, and they don't really know why. They just do it because they've always done it. And isn't that religion for you?
SPEAKER_05But after October 7th, he now professes the idea that the Bible promises the Jewish people the right to occupy, ethnically cleanse, and control the territories of the Palestinian people. Raised a Roman Catholic, Bill now maintains an atheistic nostalgia for Israel in what can only be described as a colonizer's mindset. He's a firm ally of Trump and Israel's wars in the Middle East. So we will be tracing the wandering footsteps of the most smug reactionary liberal in America, Bill Maher. His early career was as a sardonic libertine who saw his role as an iconoclast against the pieties of the average American bumpkin. He was happy to lambass religion, Christianity in particular, mention politics, and slaughter the sacred cows of uptight white Christian Americans. This led to the creation of his first mass media program, Politically Incorrect, with Bill Maher. Started in 1993, it was originally broadcast on Comedy Central and later picked up by ABC. The show included celebrities, journalists, politicians, and activists in unscripted and confrontational panel discussions and what became a standard model of loud, red-faced arguments. The show quickly gained a reputation for centrist contrarianism, the earliest expression of the now shop worn enlightened centrist who criticized conservatives over religion, censorship, and the culture wars, while also mocking liberals for what he saw as a priggish, excessive political correctness. Mars' personal politics embraced a kind of anti-establishment libertarian streak that distrusted both parties and celebrated provocation as a political virtue, something that we've seen time and time again as we cover these reactionary figures. He foregrounded his positions as a social liberal, he loudly supported abortion rights, marijuana legalization, and a strict separation of church and state, as well as championing environmental causes. Most important of all, Marr positioned himself as a strident atheist, positioning himself firmly against the religious right, especially of the type that grew around the successful electoral campaign of George W. Bush in 2000. Marr became one of the most visible atheist voices in mainstream entertainment. And then 9-11. 9-11. I think that really is the best way to understand Bill getting buffeted around by historical forces. And 9-11 was no exception. In the weeks following the attacks, a nearly unanimous patriotic convulsion seized the American people. And Bill Maher made a mistake that would turn out to be his greatest possible boon to his career. He accidentally told the truth on network television. During a late 2001 episode of Politically Incorrect, Maher agreed with guest Dinesh D'Souza that the attackers were not cowards in the literal sense, praised their bravery while criticizing American Warfare as a distant video game and technologically detached. The backlash was overwhelming and immediate. Advertisers withdrew, Bush Whitehouse condemned his remarks, and ABC canceled the show.
SPEAKER_06He found himself fired. Like this guy, this guy's one of the fucking biggest dumbasses to exist.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. And you know, this firing though ultimately and permanently shaped his worldview. And I think it was ultimately an asset for him because it put him at loggerheads with the Bush administration and the censorious right. And that would turn out to be his golden ticket. Like he got a self-image as a political dissident who was fired for his speech. And ultimately, truth telling. American military uses stealth bombers, American military uses cruise missiles, American military is separate and apart. And that's how we carry out our wars. We make the casualties of American troops as low as possible, and we use the most expensive, exquisite weapons to rain hell on our enemies. And call it what you will, but brave doesn't come into it. You're like, if you're not at risk of being injured, but the opponent is, they're the brave one for fighting you. And that was what Bill was saying, and ultimately is fundamentally true. And so this allowed him to frame himself as someone punished for challenging patriotic consensus. And he later connected that experience to broader debates about cancel culture, free speech, and what we used to call in the early 90s being politically incorrect. And this like positioning against the Bush administration and the kind of like fervor that grew after 9-11 and the global war on terror, that positioned him as a public figure against the Bush administration. And ultimately, in the run-up to the Iraq evasion, he was granted a second program, Real Time with Bill Maher, this time on premium cable HBO. Modeled much in the same way as politically incorrect, Real Time with Bill Maher was a bit sharper, and it was now being transmitted on, as I said, a premium cable channel that allowed profanity and looser rules over the content, which made it inherently more flippable, more interesting, because people were allowed to say fuck and speak openly without worry of being canceled by advertisers. As the Bush administration sunk the country deeper to the Iraqi quagmire, approval of Republicans and Bush in particular crashed. Mars politics evolved into a more eclectic and confrontational mix of liberalism and anti-populism and cultural backlash politics. And he remained firmly opposed to the Republican right on issues like climate change, Christian nationalism, and authoritarianism. And during these Bush years, he aligned more and more closely with anti-war Democrats, secular liberals, and critics of neoconservatism. But he still connected himself to that kind of like atheistic r slash atheist anti-theist milieu.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, like the yeah, Christopher Hitchens, like Dawkins, Sam Harris, the four horseman type guys, or whatever of new atheism.
SPEAKER_05That's what's so interesting about Bill, and I would love to hear you guys' thoughts on this, because like he was buffeted to the left by events, getting fired for praising the 9-11 hijackers as brave, or describing them that way at least. And then like he ended up having this kind of like strongly anti-theist, cringe-lord, internet-based belief system where like religion poisons everything, right? The Christopher Hidgens famous book. And I think a lot of us, if you're in this space, probably flirted with those ideas when they were popular in the you know late aughts. Oh, absolutely. But it almost caused him to wrap around back into supporting neoconservatism, as I will continue to argue. He, by by being like fixated on blaming religion for everything, he was then kind of wrapped into this like critical approach toward Islam that ultimately had him supporting the people that he originally distanced himself from. He made this documentary called Religious, which reinforced his image as a combative atheist and critic of organized religion. And most people at this point kind of associated him with a post-Bush liberal coalition that rallied around and ultimately delivered victory for Barack Obama. And this is where he kind of remained, flirting with these kind of vicious anti-theistic politics, but at the same time pushed in the direction of kind of a secular, progressive, crunchy left. And he remained that place. So much so that in even during the 2016 primary, Bill Maher developed a strong public alignment with Bernie Sanders that reflected Maher's frustration with like establishment democratic politics, which was unpopular after years of war, financial crises, growing inequality, and the failure of you know Barack Obama to achieve change. On real time, Bill continually and repeatedly praised Bernie Sanders for speaking directly about class power, corporate influence, campaign finance corruption, and supported universal healthcare in a way that Maher believed traditional Democratic politicians had avoided. And this is like the most left-wing Bill Maher ever got. You may not even recognize this, Bill Maher.
SPEAKER_06It's all downhill from here.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it's all downhill from here. Maher framed Bernie Sanders as a candidate willing to confront oligarchic wealth and the failures of neoliberal economics, especially after the 2008 financial collapse. And he contrasted Bernie Sanders' authenticity and consistency with the carefully managed image of Hillary Clinton, arguing that Sanders was generating genuine enthusiasm among younger voters and independents because he appeared less scripted and less tied to the traditional donor class politics. And he also had he actually admired Bernie Sanders' willingness to identify as a Democratic Socialist at a moment when American media still treated Sanders as politically radioactive. And this is like weird because he even would bring on a lot of Bernie Kratt advocates or even Sanders surrogates. He would bring on so Bill Maher would bring on Bernie Sanders surrogates to his show. And it kind of fit into his broader identity as kind of an iconoclast, as a someone who stood apart and critical of both parties. Like Sanders provided him that ability. So by leaning into what was a grassroots popularity of Bernie Sanders, this is where Barr, you know, was able to position himself during 2015 and 2016 and criticized Democratic Party leadership and major media outlets for underestimating Sanders' popularity and treating Clinton's nomination as inevitable. And on his show, he would often challenge pundits who dismissed Sanders as unelectable, pointing to his large rallies and appeal among working class and younger voters. Even after Clinton secured the nomination, Maher continued describing Sanders as a figure who had shifted the Democratic Party leftward on healthcare, college tuition, and economic inequality. And at the same time, Marr became deeply committed to defeating Donald Trump and eventually urged Sanders supporters to back Clinton in the general election. And he was like, he started to become fixated on the Bernie or bust, you know, idea and the idea that progressives or leftists who supported Sanders weren't going to line up behind Clinton, right? And this is where Bill Mars started to shift back more and more firmly into the right and became more skeptical of what he would call, you know, the college left or the young left or the progressive left or the activist left. And that's when he started to become increasingly hostile toward what he described as woke politics, campus activism, speech policing, and forms of identity politics. When Sanders was defeated in that 2016 election, he started to become fixated on those people who had remained loyal and did not like Hillary. With the defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton, large parts of his commentary started to focus on that cancel culture, generational conflict, and what he viewed as ideological rigidity among younger progressives.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, because it's it's the it's a young people who's like ideologically rigid, not this fucking dinosaur, dude. Like Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Imagine doing ride or die for Hillary Clinton. That's my most fascinating aspect of this. The least charismatic, least interesting, least inspiring uh political figure of all time. Not of all time, but of the last 50 years, being your your ride or die is is fucking fascinating. It's like he links immense amount of boring vibes, the seriousness of adult politics, right? Like it's she she offers just enough of nothing for it to be a real politics. If you offer kooky shit like uh what the Republicans offer, that's not serious politics. But if you offer stuff that is actually supposed to quote unquote improve society somewhat, you're also kooky, but you're the you're too passionate, yeah. You're too passionate, you're a young kooky guy. But when you're Hillary Clinton, who literally is just like, oh yeah, I'll like do nothing, he's it's like, I love this, I need this. I love this this, this, tell me more of this. Hits with the debit card on table.
SPEAKER_05You know, in the clip where he where he begs Cornell West to support Hillary after Bernie was ultimately defeated in the 2016 primary, he talks about well, let's say you're going toward a destination. Would you like to go on a train that's going one mile an hour towards your destination, or a train that's going a thousand miles an hour in the opposite direction? So it's like Hillary Clinton was likened to the train that's moving very, very slowly, but in the direction that we want. And he kind of became fixated on the idea that the left was to blame for Donald Trump, right? Like those of us who looked at Hillary Clinton and saw her as a you know Iraq war supporter, as a as a vicious warmonger, as Secretary of State, as somebody who is willing to take bribes from Wall Street, and who her supporters were all those people that made the crises of the aughts take place. Instead of focusing on critiquing power from the position of his television show and politics, he focused on disciplining young people and the left. And I think that's where he became the Bill Maher that everybody could think of today. He had that short period of flirtation with a politics that was a little bit more transformational, but ultimately he started to fixate on disciplining the left. This shift created an unusual political position. Barr continued supporting Democratic candidates over Republicans in elections and remained broadly liberal on many policy questions, including abortion rights and marijuana legalization. At the same time, he increasingly attracted praise from centrists, anti-woke liberals, and some conservatives who appreciated his criticism of progressive cultural politics. His interviews and podcast appearances began overlapping more frequently with heterodox media figures skeptical of mainstream liberal discourse. And this is a good time to also point out the COVID-19 pandemic. Bill Maher had always been a vaccine skeptic. And so when, you know, both presidents Trump and Biden had basically mandated vaccines, Bill became more and more skeptical of the like public health policies that were being advocated to help contain the COVID-19 pandemic. And I think this is where I didn't know that. Yeah, like the heterodox positions started to become more and more, you know, associated with Bill. He was always kind of a vaccine skeptic, RFK Junior guy.
SPEAKER_06Oh.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Like, I don't know. I I he always uh struck me, at least like from the way he postures and you know tries to like be this guy who's viewed as a a man of recent, a man of science, etc. He always struck me as someone who'd be like, you just listen to the scientist. I'd never thought of him as like a guy who'd be like, maybe the vaccines aren't safe.
SPEAKER_05I mean, like, he literally uh like one of the things that I do recall about him in the COVID-19 pandemic is he brought on RFK Jr. And I don't know if you guys remember this, but Woody Harrelson had a monologue on SNL where he criticized the COVID-19 safety measures and pharmaceutical companies. And Bill Maher like took credit for helping him write this monologue. Oh no. Yeah, so he's always been a you know vocal opponent of vaccines. Like he opposes the flu shot and all sorts of weird things like that. So this is part of the like heterodox turn that he started to take and become more and more skeptical of even like left wing, let alone like progressive politics. And he really, really, really started to fixate on anti-woke liberals, these kind of conservatives who appreciated his criticism of you know wokeness or progressive cultural politics. And more and more people on the left, we started to criticize his focus on you know campus politics, cancel culture, and how that was pushing him toward reactionary talking points. And so he became what amounted to the quintessential, enlightened centrist, classical liberal, self-described. But throughout all of these changes through his political career, there have been a few themes that have remained remarkably consistent. He long framed himself as this cultural dissenter who distrusts ideological conformity, organized religion, partisan tribalism. Now his favorite senator is John Fetterman, who uh he brought on his show, right? The uh heterodox so-called centrist pro-Israel zealot who now votes pretty consistently with Trump when the rest of the Democratic Party has found their backbone, as rare as that is.
SPEAKER_02I I I see I saw recently reports you had, I think, your chief of staff quit on you and start talking shit about you. Yeah. Uh and we know you made no secret of it. In fact, you purp purposely publicized it so that people would take inspiration from it, that you had a stroke, you had issues with depression. And it seemed to me like they were sort of weaponizing that to say you'd gone crazy. And it I did smell kind of a rat here when I read that you were driving recklessly and too much time on Twitter and like, you know, megalomania. I'm like, hmm. So uh defend yourself here, John. I mean, I don't think you're crazy. You don't seem crazy, but and I have certainly seen people who refuse to go all the way with the purity lovers on the left, suddenly castigated and cast out as and and attacked like this. So is that what's going on?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Uh part parts of my party just wants to turn me into a Colonel Kurtz, you know, and just claim that it's like, oh, like I'm just like a you look like you can play the part. Yeah, yeah. So uh Aurelia, that would happen, you know, after Israel and after the border, and some of the times I might have to disagree with with my party. And that's really we brought us to that place where, you know, just that kind of a canceling was a little bit a different thing, but now we've all moved on from that. But but absolutely that's uh the the truth the truth.
SPEAKER_05Um and we can see that transition from that 1990s libertarian style irreverence to a modern anti-woke liberal identity shaped heavily by the post-9-11 backlash that nearly ended his career. And now he is now he's firmly a pro Zionist, enlightened centrist, vaccine skeptic. I think that big shift that has made him firmly reactionary and worthy of that episode on our show happened after the October 7 attacks.
SPEAKER_01His second 9-11.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, his second 9-11, unironically. But the first 9-11 pushed him left. October 7th pushed him firmly to the right. Yeah, he could only take one. Yeah, he can only take one 9-11.
SPEAKER_011-9-11 for Bill Maher, please. Can I have uh four 9-11s and two Bill Maars?
SPEAKER_06I'm not gonna say what I was gonna say. I was gonna say we need another 9-11 to course correct him, but like we really don't. We don't tweet those. I'm gonna firmly be anti-9-11, okay? Yeah, I'm also gonna take an anti-9-11 stance here on this podcast. FBI agent that listens to this.
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna trade my six 9-11s for three Bill Mars. Oh no in the reactionary Yu-Gi-Oh! deck.
SPEAKER_05Three left-wing Bill Mars. Oh god. Just don't fall asleep in the back of the limo, man.
SPEAKER_01Great idea for a first uh reaction podcast merch drop.
SPEAKER_06Bill Maher Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.
SPEAKER_01That's gonna sound like all no, not Bill Maher Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, but Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Literally, like a get- Oh my god. A card game with reactionary figures and events that can be used as as uh cards as well in a deck.
SPEAKER_06I had a fucking insane idea, but I don't that one isn't good. Uh and me saying this is gonna get me in trouble. But you know that like uh playing card deck that they handed out to people in Iraq with like all the uh people in the fucking government. Like I'm I'm I say no more.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that one would get us in prison. That yeah, that was that is problematic. But gamifying it, imagine like Ganda Sewens, and she has stats. Bill Maher, he has stats. Uh Joe Rogan, he has stats.
SPEAKER_05Bill Maher's int one, wisdom one, strength one, charisma one, cocks 10. Cock size? I don't know. You're gonna have to you know something we didn't investigate.
SPEAKER_06That's the theory. Is that what you uncover during your research? That's in the Ugatnik section.
SPEAKER_01A lot of people apparently say that he's hung like a horse. Holy shit. Oh god. What kind of research did you do?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I did research on his politics, on his dick. Fucking Jesus Christ. This is what they do in Serbia.
SPEAKER_01Gotta check the Kaka. They gotta check the Kaka. But but jokes aside, tell us unironically in the comment section. Tell us in the comment section if you would be interested in in a reaction podcast Yu-Gi-Oh deck. Unironically, but not Yu-Gi-Oh! but like a deck of cards uh where everybody's got abilities and so on, and it's like you need like three 9-11s in order to summon Belmar. You get what I mean? Like shit like that. I think this would be brilliant. It's magic the gathering land. Yes, reactionary magic, the gathering up to a hundred cards, for example, and then split like you you pull and you get your particular events and characters, and then you play against the other person. I think that would sell like hotcakes.
SPEAKER_06That will be making an actual game is is like incredibly fucking ambitious, but making like a trading card deck, I think, is like genuinely possible. You know those like tops trading cards and shit with like all kinds of people or you know, figures on them and stuff like that. That being said, you would absolutely get fucking sued for selling someone's face on a card, wouldn't you?
SPEAKER_05Uh yeah, I mean, maybe, maybe it depends. It depends.
SPEAKER_01And so, for example, what a character would be KKKK Landis Owens, right? Like Clandis Owens. Like, no, but we would not use the identical names, yeah. But it would be recognizable about who the inspiration is, and there's nothing uh wrong with having um fictional characters be inspired by um real-world people, or nor is there anything illegal in the world. Disclaimer, none of these people are immediately of course the Norwegian man will immediately think about lawsuits.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, yeah. He doesn't want Candace Owens to get his share of the fucking uh state fund of the oil. Exactly, yeah.
SPEAKER_01But instead of being excited about a way to potentially really, really appropriately fund the show. So unironically, comment sections right now, especially Patreons. Tell us if you would love a, I don't know, collector's card deck or whatever. We'll figure it out with reactionary figures, as if they're literal monsters from DD fighting each other.
SPEAKER_06That would be kind of funny, actually.
SPEAKER_01Apologies for the sl small interludes.
SPEAKER_05Oh, well, I mean, when you're talking about Bill Maher's second 9-11, the October 7th attacks, that caused Bill to become even more confrontational posture with sections of the contemporary left, especially the pro-Palestinian movement and younger activists and progressive organizations that tried to frame the conflict through reality, history, as an anti-colonial or anti-imperialist conflict. On real time, Bill strongly defended Israel's right to respond militarily and argued that parts of the activist left minimized the brutality of the attacks or treated Hamas as a symbol of resistance rather than a reactionary militant movement. And like that is really the essence of it, right? Like, Bill doesn't see Muslims and Arabs as capable of making a legitimate claim to self-defense. And what's really funny about Bill is he himself was raised Catholic and he identifies as an atheist, but he claims that his mother is Jewish, and so he adopts a kind of like Jewish ethnic identity that's religiously religious atheist, like that, you know, uh the ethno-religion aspect of Judaism he identifies strongly with, even though he doesn't practice Judaism in any way, was not raised Jewish. He nonetheless maintains this like nostalgia for Israel and is a very strong Zionist. He calls like campus demonstrations where they chant slogans like from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, as moral confusion and a kind of alliance between progressive politics and Islamo fascism, right? The this is a conspiracy theory that's common throughout Europe and large growing in the United States, of like saying that there's a red-green alliance between Islamists and progressives and socialists. And he connected this like view, this like viciously Zionist and anti-Palestinian view, with his larger critiques of wokeness or political correctness going back almost 30 years. And he's now focused on calling us ideologically rigid, historically uninformed, and disconnected from liberal values, which is ironic because Israel is an ethno-supremacist state where different religions and different viewpoints are not accepted as equal within Israeli society. There is a preferred ethno religion, it is an ethno-state, it is the state of what they call the Jewish people, and people like Bill Maher, who have never set foot in Israel, if they can properly verify their Jewish identity, have more rights to the land in Israel than Palestinians who have been there in an unbroken chain for hundreds or thousands of years. And this period has accelerated him as a media figure with associated with anti-woke liberalism and intensified his appeal among centrists, older liberals, Zionists, and conservatives who like to tweak the nose of the modern progressive left. And ultimately, you know, as I said before, his favorite senator is John Fetterman. And if you know anything about John Fetterman, I'm sorry we wouldn't interrupt you.
SPEAKER_01Somehow the worst uh ride or die character than Hillary Clinton. He has found her. He has found him. I apologize for my earlier comment.
SPEAKER_05Well, a recent poll had John Fetterman underwater with Democrats by 30 points. So in Pennsylvania. Like, so John Fetterman is absolutely despised by the Democratic Party that actually exists. And what's so interesting about John Fetterman is how similar he is to Bill Maher in that he started his political career as a progressive. Yep. You know, he had campaign ads where he was like flying the, you know, progressive LGBT flag, and you had Muslim immigrants praying. And he talked about how he was an unabashed progressive at Netroots Nation, and he campaigned for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and accepted Bernie Sanders' endorsement when he ran for lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania in 2018. Like this guy tried to get the DSA endorsement, but was ultimately rejected, right? John Fetterman came up in politics pretending to be some sort of progressive left-flank guy.
SPEAKER_02I live here in Hollywood. I have to live amongst people, most of whom who think it's cool to wear the kafaya to the Oscars and to say, you know, free Palestine. As if Palestine would be liberated by living under Hamas. By the way, Israel, geniuses educated on TikTok, was liberated in 2005 by Israel. Israel gave it back and said, here, you have your land again, you do something with it, and this is what they did with it. I mean, they made it into a fortress, didn't spend it on the people, or turning it into any sort of it could have been Dubai.
SPEAKER_03I agree. And I sat with Bill Clinton, we were campaigning in Harris, and I was like, hey, thanks for your work. And Clinton, he reminds us, it's like, yeah, we offered them 96% of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem was the capital. You know, here you go.
SPEAKER_06I don't know how, but I have a distinct memory of watching Bill Maher on early YouTube. I don't know which show it was. It might have been politically incorrect, probably was, or it could have been early real time. What I do remember is a topic. In 2008, as Mike mentioned, he made a documentary satirizing major world religions. In the same year, Reddit's R slash Atheism Community was founded. And in 2011, it was made into a default subreddit that every user of the site would see unless they opted out of it. From clips of Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, and Sam Harris, whose defense of race science we've talked about in the past, early YouTube saw the emergence of a self-described skeptic community. The skeptics, for the most part, took aim at major religions. And out of those, mostly Christianity and Islam. Bill Maher was sort of a hanger-on to this wave of new atheism.
SPEAKER_02And finally, new rule, you shouldn't be able to talk about DEI anymore in America. DEI, that's diversity, equity, and inclusion, without including atheists. Thank you, a few of you.
SPEAKER_06A lot of groupus were incubating inside this online skeptic community, including the groups that would go on to form the rank and file of the anti-SJW movement, classical liberal gamergators, and so on. When you think about it, the debate pro style of his content, where he's dunking on these stupid delusional theists who believe in ghosts or whatever, is not functionally much different to the anti-SJW style of content of ten years ago, or the anti-woke content of today.
SPEAKER_01It feels so severely dated. So severely dated to those of us who have uh been you know paying attention to this entire, let's say, field of digital reactionary for so long. But as you know, Mike has covered and Freda probably will, this is not the this is content is not directed at people who experienced Gamergate ten years ago. It's people who are late to every party ten years and can experience and live vicariously through our trauma.
SPEAKER_06I'll live vicariously through this. The crux of this style of content, whether it's made by Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Stephen Crowder, Sargon of Pakad, Charlie Kirk, or Bill Maher, is to present the subject of your ridicule as stupid, ill-informed, or unreasonable, and yourself as the reasonable, informed, and measured observer. The problem, of course, is that Mars or Bill's vibe of smoke superiority is incredibly unearned.
SPEAKER_05How do you define Wilkins? Because I hear people use the term all the time, and it means something different to everybody.
SPEAKER_02Well, again, I think it's this collection of ideas that uh are not building on liberalism, but very often undoing it. I mean, five years ago, I don't Abraham Lincoln was not a controversial figure among liberals. We liked him. Now they take his name off schools and tear down his statues. Really? Lincoln isn't good enough for you? Um, you know, five, ten years ago bedrock liberalism was we are striving to be a colorblind society where we don't see race. Um, of course we see it, but it doesn't matter. That's not what woke is. Woke is something very different. It's it's identity pocket, it's we see it all the time, it's always the most important thing. I don't think that's liberalism. I mean, I could mention so many issues like that.
SPEAKER_06That's a clip from three years ago, and the period in which about two or three Lincoln statues were removed occurred two years prior to that in 2020, when a statue depicting Lincoln standing over a kneeling naked black man in Park Square in Boston was taken down due to its imagery. This isn't some new sort of revisionism born out of 2020 wokeness. The former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass even criticized the statue at its dedication in 1876. Another statue was toppled by protesters in Portland, Oregon, in 2020, on the federal holiday, Columbus Day, during a protest dubbed Indigenous People's Day of Rage. But that statue is set to be restored this year. That's two statues that I managed to find. And Bill Marr blows this out of proportion into this huge thing. It's a minuscule phenomenon, which he portrays as a complete culture shift. Where he lives in a country he no longer really recognizes. It's really not much different to reactionaries saying, look at all these trans people who are winning all these women's sports tournaments. And it's a single person getting third in a low-level contest.
SPEAKER_05And the other thing is like, I think it's legitimate for indigenous populations to be like, hey, did you know about the largest mass execution of indigenous people happened under Abraham Lincoln, right? Like, that is part of their history that for all the liberatory effects of the Lincoln presidency, there is still a stain. And there's nothing wrong with taking in history as an adult and looking at all the aspects of somebody instead of just doing this hagiography where we cover up their sins. And the fact that conservatives or liberals want to live in a childlike world, you're an adult man, you're 70 years old. I think you could take in all of history and learn the good and the bad so that we can better perfect the society we're actually in. It's so childish, it's embarrassing.
SPEAKER_06Absolutely, yeah. In one of his clips from his show, Real Time with Bill Maher, titled, quote, New Rule: a Unified Theory of Wokeness, which by the way is a fucked-up title, he rails against liberals for the way they teach history.
SPEAKER_02And finally, New Rule, you can get creative with a novel, a TV show, or a movie, but history books, that's not supposed to be fan fiction. How we teach our kids history has become a big controversy these days, with liberals accusing conservatives of wanting to whitewash the past, and sometimes that's true. Sometimes they do. But plenty of liberals also want to abuse history to control the present. And last month a scholar named James Sweet caught hell for calling them out for doing just that. He criticized a phenomenon known as presentism, which means judging everyone in the past by the standards of the present. It's the belief that people who lived a hundred or five hundred or a thousand years ago really should have known better.
SPEAKER_05He's using presentism to mean we shouldn't study the bad things. We should create these secular myths. We should create these secular saints, right? And you're actually doing sacrilege against the American project if you say that Abraham Lincoln is not stainless, right? Or is or is and and like that that is part of what has made American politics so deeply reactionary, because you know, it's one thing if you want to teach like moral stories or historical uh accounts to young children, like as a part of their development, but those stories are not sacred, they should be updated as a child's development takes place to a full more complete picture. And these guys want to do propaganda, they want to they want to indoctrinate and they want to do propaganda to justify America's crimes today by you know inculcating this sense of American exceptionalism where the United States is like so good and pure and honest, which is why we can do these wars abroad, because we are the the shining beacon on the you know, shining city on the hill. But if you teach about our sins, if you teach about the imperfections of American history or where we fall short, well suddenly that exceptionalism doesn't seem to be true. And that's what they're fighting against. It's for a desire of empire.
SPEAKER_06He also doesn't really know what presentism means or how it's used usually. There are multiple interpretations of what actually constitutes presentism, or a problematic application of modern standards or views on history. For example, a view I agree with is that it would be problematic to assert that homosexual relations in ancient Greece constitute queer relationships in the modern sense, right? But on the flip side, I believe, as do most historians, it would be problematic for us as a society in which queerness is increasingly normalized, for academics not to even investigate this angle and arrive at a definitive answer. That's sort of the issue. Like, Bill Maher just wants to fucking close his eyes to these new questions we have.
SPEAKER_05Just to vibe off this, this is exactly what I was talking about, which is like the way that we look at history is part of our politics of today, right? So in the way that they used to look at ancient Greece is they would cover up these relationships, right? They would they would sanitize Greek culture away from what it actually was to a version that would be more acceptable to that conservative American worldview of the early 20th century, right? Where Bill Maher grew up. But modern historians, now that we have a different perspective on academic research, and we have a different perspective on queerness or homosexual activity, we can look back with fresh eyes at the same information and come out with a different response because we're not politically constrained in the way that historians of the 50s were. And what Bill is rebelling against is he wants us to be politically constrained in the same way. He's trying to enact a reactionary politic.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, exactly. And it's also like a lot of people who confront this and think this stuff like this quote unquote rewriting of history is uh is problematic, is they misunderstand the way this actually happens. The underlying facts haven't changed. The sources remain the same. You know, the events uh such as they are, the stuff that we can all agree on, that remains the same. But our interpretation and understanding changes, and that is natural. History has not, you know, remained static for all time. And there are statues right now which came up very recently, like in terms of the great march of history, these statues are quite new that people want to remove, because there are interpretations now that very much differ from the interpretations of the people who race those statues. Because a lot of those statues that have now, thankfully, come down, were raced in order to honor racial supremacy in America. The American historian Haasok Chang said, quote, like funerals, history writing is for the living. That is to say, history is written for our present society to understand the past. Bilmar obviously doesn't actually care about history, he cares about one particular story that's near and dear to him and others of his kind. Here is a clip from November 2023.
SPEAKER_02And finally, new rule for all the progressives and academics who refer to Israel as an outpost of Western civilization like it's a bad thing. Please note, Western civilization is what gave the world pretty much every goddamn liberal precept that liberals are supposed to adore. Individual liberty, scientific inquiry, rule of law, religious freedom, women's rights, human rights, democracy, trial by jury, freedom of speech. Please, somebody stop us before we enlighten again. And since one can find all these concepts in today's Israel and virtually nowhere else in the Middle East, if anything, the world would be a better place if it had more Israels. Of course, this message falls on deaf ears to the current crop who reduce everything to being only victims or victimizers. So Israel is lumped in as the toxic fruit of the victimizing West. The irony being that all marginalized people live better today because of Western ideals, not in spite of them.
SPEAKER_01Everybody claps.
SPEAKER_05Because he's he's you know he's trying to argue that you know science and industrial development came out of the white race. And you know, the things that we have solved uh through the you know scientific process can be attributed to the white race. Now he says Western civilization, but it's barely a euphemism.
SPEAKER_06Exactly. And never mind the fact that like he's talking about the scientific method, right? That's not something that exclusively people in what we now consider the West figured out. There's also the Islamic golden age where a lot of this stuff was being figured out, you know.
SPEAKER_05Well, I mean, it it's sort of like whenever there's a mathematical rule or concept that's was discovered by a white person, it's called it's given their name. If that same you know, physics or mathematical concept was come up, came up with a black person or an Arab, it gets a uh, you know, it gets called the binomial function. You know, uh where we or the quadratic equation. We don't we we don't learn the names of the people from outside the West that developed or came up with these concepts. And so that's why people like Bill could say this with a straight face, because he's stupid. Yeah, he's incredibly stupid. And of course he doesn't know anything about all Andalusia or you know, all sorts of other forms of preservation of knowledge, or the or the way that you know most of the stars and the visible night sky have Arab names because they are the ones who advanced early astronomy. He doesn't know any of this shit because he's dumb. And that's what a lot of these, you know, conservative centrist, enlightenment centrist scientist, scientism believers, they don't actually understand or study the philosophy of science. And Bill, you know, when he pushes this idea that Israel is an outpost, he ignores the fact that the institutions of the Arab world have been continually assaulted and invaded and subjugated by an imperializing West. And to him, their weakness, the fact that they were imperialized, is proof of their inferiority.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well what you guys said earlier about the subjective lens through which we view particular events and societies and cultures throughout history applies to him so immensely because he considers the particular era in which he was taught history to be the only true one only because he very intensely reacts and contradicts any sort of interpretation of history that has come after that. But what is the very specific type of historical viewpoints that he has most likely gotten in his earlier life, which he defines as you know the non-woke, normal and rational view towards, be it Western civilization, be it the experiences of uh certain groups throughout throughout the different eras of particular societies, it is one that is exceptionally American-centered and more importantly, arguably American white man-centered. So whenever anybody is looking at past events and discussing the experiences of groups that he might not necessarily identify with, you know, the Western man or whatever, he immediately implies that this is the rewriting of history, even though it simply adds another POV from a group that might not see things the same way the quote unquote enlightened Western man had seen at that time, which allows us to have a more complex perspective of everything that was going on uh in that particular moment in time. So there is a strong sense of naturalizing very one very particular subjective perception of events, be it back then or being now. So this is a natural, rational way of looking at it. And every other POV is de facto irrational and somehow revisionist, be it of modern politics or of stuff that has happened before. So TLDR, as both of the boys have already said, I mean, it takes a racist, honestly.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, it's Western chauvinists as white supremacist. And also, I think the statue toppling like stuff that they always bring up, even Bill Maher, who you know purports to be on the left, brings it up. Like that stuff is so indicative of how they view history because those statues aren't being melted down and going away. They're being put into museums, they're not gone. They're not the history isn't being erased, just being moved out of a place of worship or a place of like, you know, of reverence at a public square. Same thing with history. If uh you've got these you know past narratives that are a little fucked up, a little racist or whatever, they're not being erased. They're just being complemented by more up-to-date and better, more reflective narratives of perhaps what the past might have looked like, you know? What it what it might have been like.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And it also ignores that throughout history we changed our opinions about what happened earlier and then redesigned both the cities, the aesthetic, or the places of worship the based on our newer interpretation of what has happened before. Like, this is not a 21st century woke moment. We've literally been tearing down statues whenever we change our mind about a particular thing for like thousands of years. It takes a certain level of maniacal egoism to be like, ah, these kids nowadays, they're starting a new thing, and the new thing is something we've been doing since we first figured out how to make a statue.
SPEAKER_06Like it's it's absurd. And for someone who warned about presentism, however, Bill Maher's idea of a past is one that is justified by the present, and also justifies the present situation. I need to explain what history really is to make my point clear here. History isn't a series of past events, it's actually how we, in the present, reconstruct an idea of a past, utilizing sources and other pieces of information. So when Bill Maher thinks about history, he sees a protagonist, the West, struggling its way to the point we're at right now, where society is about as good as it's going to get. In reality, all these things that Bill Maher is so thankful for were achieved over the course of long processes and sometimes struggles. When women won their rights, they didn't win them struggling against an Islamic caliphate in the Middle East. They won them struggling against the West. The society they lived in. Democracy is a core aspect of the West to Bill Maher, but he lives in a country that didn't even have universal suffrage until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Bill Marr was literally alive at the time. He was like nine years old. He was born into a Western country where black people didn't even have equal rights under the law. Listeners of this podcast understand that Bill Maher is being racist here. He's talking about all the rights Israel affords its citizens, which apparently are non-existent anywhere else in the Middle East, while conveniently leaving out the part where the country is a literal apartheid state, where these so-called rights aren't afforded to Palestinians living under illegal Israeli occupation. Bill Marr will always portray himself as offering reasonable criticisms of bad ideas, Islam and Christianity being two such bad ideas. But when he talks about the West and then cultures he views as foreign, the mask has a tendency to slip. Bill Marr broached the topic of kids protesting in solidarity with the Palestinians facing a genocide. Listen to this.
SPEAKER_02With the kids demonstrating for Hamas, they are in with the terrorists. Well, it's sort of the same cause. Boy, are you? Um I'm on the side of the kids. Yeah, that's easy to say. You know, no one wants to see kids dead. Uh this is a war. That's very brave of you to say this. This is a this is a war. No, I'm the one who's actually brave on this. Um, it's easy to say I'm for the kids. Who's not for the kids? It comes down to real hard-nosed decisions. Like talking like you're a general.
SPEAKER_06His brave take is, of course, well, maybe some kids gotta die. Israel got attacked, so some tens of thousands, possibly over a hundred thousand people, gotta die to American-made bombs. There was a segment from Bill Maher's show from 2014 where he and race science defender Sam Harris are debating the dangers of quote radical Islam against, among others, Ben Affleck for some reason. Who just kind of flips out at him eventually and says, quote, We've killed more Muslims than they have us by an awful lot. We've invaded more Muslim countries than they've invaded ours by an awful lot. Yet somehow we're exempted from these things because they're not really a reflection of what we believe in. We did it by accident. That's why we invaded Iraq and it put four million people, and then Bill Maher cuts him off. Here's another clip.
SPEAKER_02It is true that for too long we didn't study enough Asian or African or Latin American history. But part of the reason for that is, frankly, there's not as much to study.
SPEAKER_06It's just absolutely racist. Because he he kind of he asserts that because he doesn't know about these things, surely they don't exist, right? Like his ignorance is uh is proof that these things aren't real. The kind of stuff you hear when Bill Maher talks about foreign cultures and when he talks about wokeness is virtually indistinguishable from something a fascist or another out-of-the-closet reactionary might say. But it's worse, because since he's a liberal, he has to be so fucking smug and annoying about how he's racist. This actual fucking dinosaur convinces people that they can hold these intensely reactionary positions and still be one of the good guys, so to say. Because he votes Democrat and he doesn't like Trump. The result of all of this output is a cadre of people who are blind to injustices of the world, who think struggles are a thing of the past, who think everything's going to be just fine, and who will smugly admonish anyone who wants to do anything about it. And while doing all this, they pretend they're on the right side of history.
SPEAKER_02Colleges replaced courses in Western Civ. Boo! I roll, dead white men, am I right? They replaced that with world civilization classes, which is fine in theory, but what it meant in practice is you read queer poetry of the African diaspora instead of Shakespeare. And I'm sure there's value in both. But as usual, America only ever over-corrects. And so we're at this place now where the words Western Civ became kind of a shorthand for white people ruined everything.
SPEAKER_01So, as you've heard by now, Bill Maher's whole thing is selling boomer reactionary politics as if it's just being normal. And his show is basically a weekly infomercial for that attitude disguised as edgy liberal realism. What makes him dangerous isn't that he's secretly right wing, is that he's marketed as a liberal while he patiently trains an older audience to see any politics to the left of Bill Clinton as a mental illness. Marr pitches himself as the rare old-fashioned liberal who's brave enough to go after both sides. The only adult in the room who isn't afraid of the woke Twitter mob. Profiles and outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal repeat this branding almost word for word. His, as we've learned from the boys, the anti-PC, anti-woke crusader, supposedly skewering Democrat and Republican assholes alike. But in practice, and this is what my segment is about, his actual show show, that persona is a costume. A costume that he wears so he can launder very familiar right-wing culture war talking points into an HBO studio full of self-identified liberals. He will say, Look, I'm a lifelong Democrat. I voted for Obama right before launching into a monologue about fragile millennials cancel culture and how the left is ruining everything. The but I'm one of you, quote unquote preface is his main spiel. It tells an older liberal audience you're not becoming conservative, you're just staying sensible while the kids go insane. Going left is insane. You, my friend, are normal. The structure of this show, very aptly titled Real Time, is perfectly engineered to sell that worldview. Every episode follows a strict system, an opening monologue, a couple of interviews, a panel, and then new rules as the sermon at the end. Over more than 500 episodes since 2003, with millions of viewers per week, that format has become one of the main ways TV liberals are taught what counts as reasonable and crazy. The monologue in the beginning sets the frame. Marr tells you what the week's real issues are and who is being very ridiculous about all of it. The panel then acts out that script, a carefully balanced mix of center-right pundits, brand safe liberals, and the occasional weirdo, all debating within the boundaries Mar just defined. And then new rules. It closes with a long rant that starts like a joke and ends like a TED talk from your uncle that thinks gays are okay, but would beat the shit out of his son if he came out of the closet with lines like, I'm just saying what everyone is thinking. Delivered, of course, from a multi-million dollar set. Marr loves to claim he's one of the only late night hosts who really goes after both sides. But if you listen for more than five minutes, you will notice who he's really obsessed with. He spends plenty of time hitting Republicans, sure, but there's a special fire reserved for the left. Bertie Sanders is now all of a sudden a cancer. The party's left wing is scarier and crazier than Trump, and if Democrats ever actually nominate someone like that, it's game over. The asymmetry is important. The right is dangerous, but the left is irresponsible, childish, then ruining everything for the adults. When he talks about figures like AOC or Ilhan Omar, he isn't just disagreeing with them. He's using them as props to warn Democrats that any move left, even in the most milkedosed way, is electoral suicide while treating MAGA extremists like a separate kind of species of crazy that somehow doesn't discredit the entire right. The effect is propaganda by calibration. Marr doesn't tell you to become a right winger. He ensures no liberal becomes a leftist. Even the cutest little baby leftist. His show is not a pipeline to reaction, as much as it is a wall stopping you from reconsidering certain reactionary sentiments you might hold yourself. He pulls you out of exploring your own biases, out of exploring your own worldview, especially those of American exceptionalist, white elitist liberal snobbery, by, as we have said ten times by now, telling you that questioning them might turn you into one of those wacky leftist psychopaths. Mars signature topic at this point is uh quote unquote woke and political correctness, which he treats as a kind of national plague threatening the middle class from a gender studies department near you. In a New York Times interview, he cites polls about how most Americans think PC culture has gone too far. Their positions himself is the guy brave enough to say it out loud, especially about millennials and Gen Zers who grew up with quote unquote helicopter parents and crying rooms. This is classic boomer reactionary content. String together a handful of campus anecdotes, social media freakouts, uh edge case stories, and suddenly the left is defined by the most online, least representative people possible. He rarely distinguishes between serious arguments about justice and the dumbest thing he saw on TikTok. It's all one big blob of woke insanity that must be broomed out of America. One way you can tell this is propaganda and not just cranky comedy is who he actually allows to answer back. Even Marz own fans have noticed that he almost never brings on the crazy liberals he spent so much time attacking. He will have MAGA weirdos, RFK Juniors, we heard, and centrist democrats on the panel, but almost never serious left or pro-Palestinian voices who could challenge his framing on topics like trans rights or Gaza. Former guests have said that producers explicitly tell panelists not to push too hard because the goal is to keep the conversation going, not have Marr get his ass handed to him on his own show. When somebody does, they mysteriously never get invited back, while repeat offender right-wing rifters cycle through his show faster than condoms at a Gayorgy at a GOP convention.
SPEAKER_05Oh God. I was going to be I was like, where is he going crazy? Crazy analog. Oh yeah, yeah. Tinder always crashes at the GOP convention.
SPEAKER_06I do want to say this sounds very fucking familiar to someone we know, like Joe Rogan. This is the same thing.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, stupid and ego-driven, and ultimately, you know, the right is never discredited, whereas the left is discredited by the weirdest person in it, right? Like there's this constant policing that needs to be done, but there's almost an intuitive and non-stop credibility to the right, you know, like they don't have to justify their existence, whereas the left does.
SPEAKER_01Beautifully put. You also notice whenever he does have debates with Republicans or even very, very fringe right wingers, he has the ability to kind of negate their opinions and kind of to an extent even low-key humiliate them because they're very low-hanging fruit. So he does invite them back on and sometimes even get into very, very spicy discussions. But he never does so, as I said earlier, with leftists or with people he didn't know were very either economic or social, usually in both cases progressive, who kick his ass from the left, which makes him kind of realize that you know he cannot defeat an opponent like that, so he just bans them. It's it's it's interesting. He loves talking to you, basically bringing in idiots from the right and completely annihilating them. But when he's the right-wing idiot compared to someone who actually knows what they're talking about and isn't just repeating talking points they probably learned in third grade, he immediately refuses to do so. And nothing reveals uh Marr's, you know, I'm just normal pose more than his cozy dinner with Donald Trump, arranged by Kid Rock, by the way, which is already a sentence that sounds like a bit he would have written 20 years ago. After this particular White House meeting, Marr went on his show to tell viewers that Trump was, quote, gracious and measured, end quote. To fucking help. And that he actually felt more comfortable talking to Trump than he ever did to Obama or Clinton. Oh my god. That segment enraged so many liberal commentators that they ended up pointing out that Marr had essentially been used as a prop in a PR effort to rehabilitate Trump's very image. The quote, he's different in private end quote, line is exactly how elites have always normalized dangerous leaders. Sure, he's starting wars every ten seconds, but he was very polite over dessert. For a guy who constantly warns about the fragility of democracy, he is very remarkably easy to flatter into telling four million people that the person he's defending them against by making them pivot right word is a good guy, actually. It's extra funny because Marr loves to lecture Democrats about being quote unquote snobs and not understanding real America, but his own Record as a masterclass in condescending big city elitism. He spent years sneering at religious people as we learned earlier, culminating into the film that uh Mike had mentioned, which you know basically ends with him declaring that religion must die for mankind to live. Washington Monthly rightly called him a hypocrite and a peddler of misinformation. The guy who scolds liberals for sounding smug to non-college educated whites has made a career out of mocking those same people's beliefs.
SPEAKER_02And finally, New Rule, now that we know that the least godly man in the world is immensely popular with evangelicals, we need no more evidence that religion is antiquated and dangerous. Yes, the fastest growing religion in America is no religion at all. Atheism is booming. Praise Jesus! Now I learned, making religious, that every time you blame religion for so much of the world's misery, religious people say, but Bill, the godless cultures like Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia and Mao's China were the worst, and they had no religion. But here's the thing about Nazism, Maoism, and Stalinism. Those were religions, state religions. These dictators didn't get rid of God because they hated religion. They get rid of God because they hated competition.
SPEAKER_01On culture war issues, he reliably punches down. Oh my god, nobody ever was surprised by this. Ranting about trans athletes, insisting Democrats are losing because they care about pronouns, mocking students for caring about racism, or like just small stuff like irrelevant stuff like colonialism.
SPEAKER_06That's from the past. Who cares? You know?
SPEAKER_01It's just not even does that even count like as history? The only thing that counts as history is white guy make train.
SPEAKER_00And also World War II. D Day, that's it. Yes, when white guys shot white guys. It was very sad. Oh no, Brother Wars.
SPEAKER_06Putting that on the soundboard.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. When Centrist Democrats suggested that support for trans rights hurt Kamala Harris, Marr was visibly moved and framed the backlash against that comment as proof that the left has gone completely crazy. Not that maybe trans people are tired of being treated as a talking point. This isn't populism, guys. It's a man so blinded by what his wealth and status have turned him into that he's pitching opera music as punk, somehow at the same time rebelling against the establishment, bro, while repeating word for word most establishment talking points on issues that really matter. What sells all of this together is the tone of the show. Mars entire style is built on wary eye rolling. Come on, be serious, energy.
SPEAKER_02Come on, come on, come on, come on.
SPEAKER_01He's not shouting like a right wing talk radio host. He's smirking, sighing, doing the I can't believe I have to explain this face while he repeats arguments you can hear on cable news every literally every day. He says nothing. That effect, the exhausted, rational dad scolding everyone for making him think about gender is how he sells reactionary politics as mere common sense. Punchlines often work as a sugar coating for the lecture underneath a new rule might start with a solid joke about I don't know, marjorie Taylor Green, then slide without warning into five minutes on how college kids are oversensitive and black lives matter went too far. By the time you realize you've left comedy and entered a Fox News monologue, the audience has already laughed, clapped, and been told that the scent is just more woke nonsense. It's a classic trick. I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed, and also coincidentally, the left is a cancer. He virtue signals in the beginning.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, unironically, it is just it is just virtue signaling.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, to the audience, he says, Hey, I'm one of you, I'm one of you, I'm one of you. So all the you know, libbed up boomers. I'm like, oh one of us, one of us, one of us. So after that, uh all the information he gives you, you you immediately adopt because you have removed uh any shield that you might have had completely from your let's call it mind, because you're like, okay, there's no potential dangerous information one of us, trademark, would would give me. But then he does by building that stone I mentioned earlier against you potentially developing more complex perspectives on these complex issues. But it's you know easy for us to just, I guess, shrug and say, Who gives a shit? He's just a crank. But Mars still pulls millions of viewers, and mainstream media routinely present him as a liberal or even progressive voice. When he rails against socialism with arguments indistinguishable from the weaker kind of right wing talking points that shapes how a lot of older Democrats think about the left. When he caricatures trans people or campus activists, that helps cement the idea that any serious push for equality of opportunity is inherently ridiculous. In other words, real time isn't just a comedy show, it's a weekly calibration of what normal is allowed to be on TV. Mars version of normal is a world where religion is stupid, but America is still basically fine. Where Trump is horrifying, but the kids protesting him are somehow the bigger problem, where the left is always the thing that went too far and the right is just a collection of colorful crazies. It's not fascism, it's the warm bath older liberals soak in while the water quietly gets hotter. So when we call Bill Maher a liberal reactionary, that's really what we mean. He's not leading a movement, he's comforting an audience. He tells them that history ended sometime around 1996, that their politics were the final draft, and that anyone trying to rewrite the script is a hysterical child or a Twitter addict.
SPEAKER_05I think the thing that really bothers me about Bill is he is the type of person who believes politics is just repeating back what you heard on cable news. And this is a frustratingly common experience if you interact with a lot of boomers. It's a generational gap between us and younger generations and their their generation where they seem to believe that the way to win is if everybody repeats the same script. And any kind of thought crime or deviation is leading to uh some sort of offense that's going to be suffered by the ultimate platonic ideal of a swing voter who's waiting out there, and if he ever sees anything that he disagrees with, then he will vote for the other side. And so they believe that the only way to win is desperately discipline anybody who might say something further to the left than him. So they are shut up and no thought crimes can be observed by the ultimate centrist.
SPEAKER_06This guy fucking sucks. I I hate him so fucking much, man, you have no idea. He's smug, he's annoying, he's racist, but maybe worse, at least to me, he's thoroughly convinced he's doing our kind of politics in a better way. When in reality his entire output boils down to rolling his eyes at passionate people who want to enact positive change and going look at those freaks. His ideological project begins and ends at keeping things as they are. He's a hardline conservative, but he'd never call himself that. He's made it his whole thing to sell right-wing ideas to centrist or liberal-minded audiences because he just thinks we're all taking things a little too far. We're overcorrecting, as he likes to say. He likes to bring up how Martin Luther King Jr. did things the right way, but a thing he doesn't say is that when Martin Luther King Jr. was fighting for racial equality in the United States, he was up against millions of people like Bill Maher every day, who thought that he was going too far. Quoting Harry Enton and 538. In a 1966 Gallup survey, 63% of Americans gave King a negative score. Now the civil rights marches are viewed as major successes, and just four percent of Americans rated King negatively in a 2011 Gallup poll. In a UGOV poll from May 3rd, 2024, 47% of Americans opposed pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses throughout the country, whereas only 28% supported them. Those numbers have changed, and those numbers will continue to change in the future. And someday we will all have been against the genocide. Bill Maher's function in the reactionary media ecosystem is to push that day just a few more inches off into the distant future, by making your mom, your annoying uncle, or your grandma skeptical of those radical youngsters on campuses. When the stakes pertain to racial or gender oppression, to queer rights, or an ongoing genocide, every single second that elapses before those causes are won counts. And Bill Maher puts every effort into adding more seconds to the clock. That is why Bill Maher is a reactionary. Thank you for listening. I think we're good. We got uh Patreon pitch uh that we can subscribe to the Patreon fuckers. Yeah, dude. Slip that in the video. Patreon, good.
SPEAKER_00Patreon, good, Patreon, very, very, very, very good.
