Vice President Kamala Harris, delivers remarks on the guilty verdicts in the Derek Chauvin trial Tuesday, April 20, 2021, in the Grand Foyer of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Bill Maher Pushes Back
In an interview in the WSJ, Bill Maher, prominent late-night comedian, a scourge to Democrats, as well as to Republicans, talks with Mr. Varadarajan. As Mr. Maher, 68, criticizes, “They hate me because I don’t hate.”
Left and Right Nut Cases
Mr. Maher, often considered a scourge of the woke, dismisses this with, “Not really:”
“AOC is a little out there. Ilhan Omar, not my favorite. There are some people, like Cori Bush, but they’re still not nearly as crazy as the crazies on the right—Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, people like that.”
Maher sums up the worldview of those two GOP congresswomen: “I don’t believe in democracy. I’m in a cult. I’ll do what Trump says. That’s the No. 1 priority, and that’s the God I serve.”
One Democrat Maher admires is Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who attributed Kamala Harris’s election loss in part to the party’s embrace of transgenderism. Moulton, the father of two little girls, protested:
“I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
WTF: Virtual Signaling
In protest, Mouton’s chief of staff resigned, while a local Democrat committee chair called him a “Nazi cooperator.” Indignant, an animated Maher almost slides off his seat, describing to Mr. Varadarajan the reaction to Mr. Moulton’s remark:
“Everything with these people has to be an opportunity for virtue signaling,” Mr. Maher says. He sits back and mouths “WTF,” then rolls his eyes and says, “Yes, of course there’s variations in human sexuality. We get that.” But that doesn’t mean “we should rewrite the anatomy and laws of human nature wholesale and think that every child born has an equal chance that they’re in the wrong body. These are not hard calls to make.”
When accused of picking on the fringes, an offended Maher defends himself, “I am not.”
“That’s old thinking. It used to be a fringe, and it migrated to places that are not fringe—like the staff of a Democratic congressman who is a perfectly good, old-school liberal and is just saying something most common-sense people think.”
“Don’t let the door hit you in the ass,” Maher pretends to say to Moulton’s chief of staff., “You are exactly who this party needs to purge.”
“… you people who quit on me when I said this reasonable thing. That would lose woke voter.”
The party received a drubbing by Donald Trump due to the failure of the rational Democratic center to push back against the “crazies.”
Maher lost some of his woke audience. Does that disturb him?
“I’ve lost woke voters—woke audience members—absolutely.” But “I think I’ve gained more people in the middle. And conservatives who are willing to hear points of view they don’t agree with but then understand where there’s crazy on the left or wrong on the right—I will say it, and they respect that.”
Going to the Gold
Bill Maher and the WSJ’s Tunku Varadarajan met in the comedian’s little shack on his Beverly Hills compound, perhaps a setting as incongruous as the comedian, who maintains that the woke nonsense is a goldmine for comedy.
“I go back and forth between things that make the right uncomfortable, and then something that makes the left uncomfortable.” He wants “the Trump people to laugh at the jokes about him because he is a preposterous figure.” And he wants leftists to laugh at “woke nonsense because that is a gold mine for comedy. Anything that’s ridiculous is a gold mine for comedy.”
When people accuse him of mocking the left much more than he used to, Mr. Maher responds, “You’re damn right I do, because you give me more material. I’m a comedian. I’m going to go where the gold is.”
Humor Reveals Truth
“When someone laughs, it is involuntary. So you can make the audience admit that they agree with you even if they really don’t want to.” But the woke don’t always laugh. “This is one of the issues I have with the left. They can’t stand to have to endure a moment of hearing something they don’t already agree with. Not that the right doesn’t do it, too, but the left does it worse.”
Virtue Gets You Where?
The Left finds it impossible to be congenial toward anyone with whom they disagree.
“They just have this need for virtue signaling, and to have their friends—and I guess everybody on social media—think of them as the good people. ‘We’re the good people. We know who’s good. And it’s us.’”
For example, it’s easy “to stand next to Donald Trump and say that next to him they definitely are.”
Mr. Maher lists a few of the things he deplores about the former and future president: allegations of sexual impropriety, disparaging the handicapped, and John McCain, “trying to stay in power when he lost an election.”
Hating Those Who Disagree
“I’ve lost friends because I’ve had somebody like Bill Barr or Ted Cruz on the show.”
After Bill Barr appeared in 2023, Mr. Maher got a “scathing message” from a friend asking why the host didn’t “immediately punch him in the nose.”
Maher, seemingly exasperated, throws up his hands,
“Bill Barr said forthrightly, ‘Trump lost.’ And that’s what I call an as-good-as-it-gets Republican. Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger. Republicans with backbone. Mitch McConnell. If you’re not going to talk to them, to Chris Christie . . .” He trails off. “You don’t want to alienate them. But the left is just too full of purists. It’s not a sign of great intellectual achievement. It’s a sign of insecurity.”
An Equal Opportunity Offender
Days after 9/11, the conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza appeared on his ABC show, “Politically Incorrect,” and took issue with the “common claim” that the suicide hijackers were cowards. “None of them backed out,” he said. “These are warriors.”
To prove his point, continues Maher,
“We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it—not cowardly. You’re right.”
Faced with outrage, NBC in 2002 declined to renew Manhar’s contract. Yet Maher is happy with his new-found freedom at HBO:
“I can attack the right, the left, everything, and that’s very rare today.”
He can even “attack religion.” His view of that topic is summed up in the title of his 2008 documentary, “Religulous.”
Given that religion has been a bulwark against wokeness, Mr. Varadarajan asks if Maher has had second thoughts about religion.
“Of course not,” he says. “But some of them are cooler than others. Some of them are less fundamentalist, less violent, and less about the afterlife. I won’t say which ones. Let’s just leave it vague. I think we know who they are.”
At this point, some readers could be forgiven for thinking Maher wants to jump ship, to change parties. Is Bill Maher ready for that kind of change?
“Many Republicans say, ‘Maybe we could get Bill Maher.’ No, you can’t. What you can get is Bill Maher being honest about the left. I’m not going to join your team that doesn’t believe in democracy.”
Still, he allows that there are voters who are “not particularly enamored with Trump, not blind to his many flaws, but they just feel that the crazy on the left is somehow worse. I don’t agree with them, but I get it. I don’t hate them for voting for him.”
A Marvel Movie Made in DC
Although Maher isn’t necessarily looking forward to the next four Trump years, he is savvy enough to understand what it could happen with an eclectic crowd in Trump’s inner gang. Maher is genuinely excited about the “band of reformers” surrounding Donald Trump:
“It’s like a Marvel movie. This gang is coming to shake things up. As a viewer, I am interested to see what this is. It’s not like America doesn’t need shaking up. We are a sclerotic, constipated country, and it just keeps slowly getting worse.”
Bill Maher, according to Mr. Varadarajan, is a big America booster. Continues Maher:
“One of my problems with the younger generation is they have no idea, no perspective. Of course, if they’ve gone to elite universities, i.e., a—h— factories, they’ve been indoctrinated into this idea that they live in the worst country in the world at the worst time in history, when actually they live in, with all our flaws, still probably the best, with definitely indisputably the best time in history.”
Mr. Maher likes America. No revolution is needed to save the country. Instead, America needs “a colonic,” but Trump wouldn’t have been Maher’s first choice to administer it.
… but I’d like to see what he and Elon Musk are going to do.”
Mr. Maher admits to loving America. He also loves what Musk has said.”
He offers the example of Mr. Musk’s take on the F-35 fighter jet, which the outspoken entrepreneur described as “obsolete” in “the age of drones. … We do need some of that thinking, and so maybe I’m going to love some of this.”
Maher refuses to buy the argument that Kamala Harris didn’t have enough time.
“People say she only had a hundred days. It didn’t matter. You get your message out in five. Other countries have elections that take two weeks.”
Pretending to be directly speaking to Kamala Harris, Maher offers,
“You had too much time, … You lost a crazy contest to an actual crazy person. Congratulations.”
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