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Bill Maher: ’10 Years Ago … the Left Did Not Have a Crazy Section’
On a recent episode of MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s podcast, comedian Bill Maher said that the political diversity of his audiences was changing.m”For the first time in my life, I am playing to a mixed audience,” Maher said. “I was in Nashville about a month ago, and the audience was about 60-40 liberal to conservative.”
“That never used to happen — never — I think it’s because 10 years ago, in my opinion anyway, the left did not have a crazy section,” Maher explained. “There was no such thing as woke, and now they do have a crazy section, which I call out as a liberal. I think I’m kind of one of the only people doing that, so there’s a hunger to hear that.”
“I think traditional liberals have had it with the far left of their own party, and they enjoy this too,” he added. “To be able to play to a crowd like I did in Nashville that’s almost split even … never happened before. The audience was almost all completely liberal, but things have changed.”
Scarborough, who spews hatred toward conservatives every day for a living, told his guest, “God, we need so much more of that. We have to have this country come together again. Unless you solve the hate problem, you will never solve any of our political problems. … When somebody just hates the other person, you don’t even listen to what they say, and you won’t even entertain what their point is. As long as we are in this place where I just hate this other side, nothing is going to change.”
Bill Maher explains why he’s playing to the first “mixed” audiences in his career and how Americans are hungry to hear the “crazy sections” in both parties being called out. Fascinating insights from Bill Maher here👉🏼https://t.co/NfWlzAR33E pic.twitter.com/L6aF7UZ2NU
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) October 6, 2021
Maher is correct. The far-left wing of the Democratic Party has gone stark-raving mad over the past several years. The problem is that much of the party has gone along with it.
Here are some examples from recent headlines:
1. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill to enact the Menstrual Equity for All Act of 2021. This law requires all public schools and universities to provide free menstrual products to students in all restrooms, including boys’ restrooms.
Yes really.
2. On Friday, Newsom signed a bill, AB 101, into law. High school students must now pass an ethnic studies course in order to graduate.
According to Cal Matters:
Specific lessons include “Migration Stories and Oral History,” “#BlackLivesMatter and Social Change,” “Afrofuturism: Reimagining Black Futures and Science Fiction,” and “US Undocumented Immigrants from Mexico and Beyond.” …
3. A UCLA accounting professor is fighting back after being suspended for not granting “racially preferential grading to black students in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis while in police custody.”
I could cite hundreds of equally crazy stories. Do these people wonder why they’ve become fodder for comedians on the left and the right?
The new religion of wokeness would actually be amusing if it weren’t taking over American culture and destroying the fabric of our society.
Wokeness in America been simmering for years, revealing itself from time to time, for example, in the reaction to the death Michael Brown in 2014 and in the “me too” movement of 2017. But it wasn’t until the death of George Floyd in May 2020 that it exploded into the open.
Floyd’s death wasn’t actually the cause; it was simply the catalyst for all-out warfare. The cries of racial justice began with an intensity we hadn’t witnessed since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It made no difference that conditions for blacks had improved greatly since that time.
And the left was delighted by the riots and the unrest that instantly spread throughout the country months ahead of the 2020 presidential election. It played into their strategy to paint then-President Donald Trump as a racist which was a real plan conceived of and promoted by the New York Times in August 2019. (Read: The Introduction of Race as a Central Issue in American Politics Can Be Traced to an Aug 2019 Staff Meeting at The NY Times.)
In a recent op-ed, historian Victor Davis Hanson calls wokeness “the evil of our age” and notes that “even the Chinese apparat could not invent a more evil, more macabre way to destroy the United States.”
He cites historical examples of civilizations that “abruptly committed suicide” after “collective madness” had gripped their citizenry.
The Jacobins in 1793 hijacked the French Revolution and turned a movement toward a constitutional republic into a totalitarian, year-zero effort to destroy the past and ensure equity for all—or else. The Reign of Terror—and eventually Napoleon—followed.
The effort to force war-weary Czarist Russia to reform into a constitutional monarchy ended up being kidnapped by a small but lethal clique of Leninist Bolsheviks. What ensued was the destruction of Russian life—and millions of corpses—over the next 70 years. Ditto Mao Zedong’s various murderous resets culminating in the cannibalistic “Cultural Revolution.” Mao’s final tab was 60-70 million deaths of his fellow Chinese.
And these historical figures used the same tactics that the woke are using today. They “toppled statues, canceled out the nonbelievers, [and] wiped away history.”
“Most of these bloodbaths started out with the supposedly noble idea of delivering social justice, equity, and fairness before they inevitably went deadly and feral,” Hanson points out.
Is there really any reason why America’s foray into wokeism will end any differently?
The left’s “crazy section” is not funny. Adherents to this dangerous ideology are methodically putting the U.S. on a course of self-destruction. The evil of wokeness has infiltrated every American institution, even the US military, and unless it can be eradicated (and soon) and completely discredited, it will end in our demise.
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There has been a crazy section on the Left for a long time; if he didn’t know that, he hasn’t been paying attention. It IS considerably larger–and much more influential throughout the society–than it was in the past.
re Hatred, here’s a post I did in 2016 about the hate, intimidation, and outright violence on the part of the Left, with examples going back to 2002: The United States of Weimar?
Maybe there is a problem on the Left. But Maher hates us just as much as the crazy part of his party does. He will gladly burn us when the time comes while joking that maybe they went too far but we had it coming.
Something about eggs, omelettes or something.
As I read your Scarborough quotation about our need to “solve the hate problem,” I think to myself that this sounds awfully familiar. It’s like the “racism problem” and the “climate problem” and the “1% problem” and all the other “problems” that are invoked as systemic catastrophes that must be addressed in a sweeping yet unspecified way.
I don’t think we have a “hate problem.” I think we have a relatively small number of dedicated loudmouths who will say anything to further their foolish agendas of socialism, radical redistributionism, reinvigorated racism, sexual nihilism, etc. We have an awful lot of foolish college kids who know nothing and are looking for the next faddish cause to justify the fun of being angry and energetic. We have a bunch of feckless cowards in our corporations and our universities who think they’ll look cool and virtuous if they treat the know-nothings as serious people with serious concerns. And we have a political class that will pander to anyone it thinks can keep it in office, no matter how crackpot and destructive the beliefs.
But if we say we have a “hate problem,” that’s like saying we have a racism problem. It’s big and vague and impossible to fix because it’s not really there, but talking about it means we don’t have to actually ask tough questions like “do you honestly believe that boys can have babies, and do you think that’s true of boy farm animals as well?” or “you do know that Venezuela (and American progressives) bragged about its socialism right up until the moment its citizens started eating their housepets, right?” or “how about we sit down and look at renewable energy from a hard-headed rational perspective and really see how those numbers work out?” or “how can we encourage young black Americans to commit less crime and get their lives on track?”
By design. The “tell?” Their heroes don’t believe it. Men can get pregnant? They don’t believe that in Beijing; they don’t believe that in Moscow; or Havana; they damn sure don’t believe it the Middle East.
I think we also have a significant number of people who enjoy exercising cruelty against socially-approved targets, where they can enjoy this malign pleasure without significant risk. I am quite sure that many of the people now engaged in ‘cancelling’ conservatives and other targets would, have they lived in say the 1920s, participated in the humiliation or worse of black people, had they lived in the 1950s, participated in calling an unmarried pregnant girl a ‘slut’ and driving her out of school and possibly to suicide, had they lived in 1930s or 1940s Germany would have…
The emotion and the moral depravity are a constant; the targets change over time and place.
It seems likely that Maher was part of the crazy section years ago, which would explain why he was unaware of it at the time.
Great post. Also, if you made it through anything Joe Scarborough congrats.
From Bill Maher’s perspective, coming into 2010, the last two years– the left didn’t have a crazy section. I can accept that. They were ascendant because Obama was president and anti-war dems had the House and Senate. They wouldn’t need or want a crazy section. I don’t think it is an entirely blinkered perspective that Maher is coming from. I can sorta see it.
My off the cuff sociology of the left and its craziness? (Left and Democrats can be used interchangeably.) They didn’t really have an institutionalized crazy section until the Bush and Afghanistan/Iraq. Then they learned to pick on socially acceptable targets– white conservative evangelicals. They learned how to isolate specific instances and use them to drive themselves (and hopefully– in their minds– others) insane over the idea that Kenneth Copeland was going to ultimately overthrow the US government or something. That became an institutional feature of left wing politics.
The subsequent adoption of the truly crazy– the rabid environmentalists– gave them (the left) a legal avenue to pursue lawfare against their enemies. Rabid environmentalists were not necessarily left wing people (e.g., dem voters) but they developed, or at least refined, a lot of legal tactics, especially regarding standing, to hamstring mining/logging/development and on, that once they got into the left wing movement via Climate Change, the left was able to pair insane blog posting with a well developed legal arm. This probably happened right around the time Bill Maher was making his observation, but it wasn’t fully directed yet.
One thing about Maher. I feel sort of sorry for him. He does not seem like a very happy individual. I suspect he is a suicide waiting to happen. I will not be overly surprised when we see it announced that he offed himself, provided they can’t cover it up.
Maher, and you, are incorrect. Every person of the left today was a person of the left yesterday. The only thing that has changed was the election of a crude populist, someone not schooled in the art of the lie. That desperate throw by the electorate sent the left into today’s spastic rage. Bill Maher is just trying to surf the wave.
Hi Hank: Thanks for reading my post! I definitely hear you but I think we do have a hate problem. The sides are so polarized, I don’t see any way that we can find common ground. I think the only thing that will shake the left out of their extremism is a resounding defeat at the ballot box next year. … Every day, I’m stunned at something new that they’ve said or done. I never thought we would see anything like this in America. I remember listening to a Dan Bongino podcast and pre-election, he was talking about what a Biden presidency would look like and I thought he was being hyperbolic. I was wrong. The country is a mess.
New taps hammered into old kegs, each bearing the label of its time.
We got “trans” mandates and the health care takeover under Obama. Ferguson burned long before Trump was elected. Hugo Chavez was in New York preaching the glories of Venezuelan socialism to an adoring left while Bush was in office.
I think, if you plot the left’s degree of crazy, you discover that the frothing at the mouth ratchets up every time a Republican is President, and has historically quieted down every time a Democrat takes office. But there’s that damned ratchet….
I actually think that the shift in tone, the willingness of the left to be visibly crazy ALL the time, has more to do with Obama than Trump. But it’s a near thing.
The crazy section has always been there. Like any successful insurgency, left unaddressed (and catered to) it grew until it became significant, and now dominant.
This is Marxism seen from too close to get perspective. We are so intimate with it that it is now easy to see only the high-frequency effects (the harmonics, if you will), even while the fundamental has now saturated our receivers.
Elizabeth Vaughn (View Comment):
Well, you could be right. But I think you’re probably a little optimistic. I do anticipate a resounding Republican win in 2022. I think some of the professional leftists, the elected ones, will take notice and change their tone. But I think the movement progressives, most of the visibly crazy ones, will double down.
Fortunately, my skills as a prognosticator are pretty poor. ;)
That’s probably a big part of it. Maher also exhorts his audiences with stuff about how Western culture is actually superior to Muslim culture for example, and they whoop and holler and shout agreement and support; but they don’t believe that in their daily lives, or in how they vote.
Maher also in the past liked to point out – and maybe still does – that “our” religious extremists aren’t dangerous like theirs, because “ours are just FUNNY! They point out the gay Tele-Tubby” etc. Whereas when one of theirs issues a “falafel” – his word – they DO IT! They behead people and stuff.
He seems to miss – perhaps intentionally – that it’s the same now, with left and right in the US. “Our” “crazy side” isn’t violent like HIS “crazy side” is. “Our” “crazy side” just says stuff about “Jewish space lasers” etc, while THEIR “crazy side” runs around burning buildings and beating and killing people.
That’s likely just because the left in general is not happy. But Maher has the problem too of denigrating marriage and such, pretending to be some kind of worldly playboy, meanwhile he keeps getting older and less attractive to women.
Just like in high school, you can’t have an “in group” without the “out group”. The thinking is even less sophisticated than some High Schoolers.
They had a crazy fringe-but it was useful then-Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink etc. Now that they are in power, it just gets in the way
Compare to BLM etc, Cindy Sheehan and Code Pink etc, would be “moderate.”
Saying the Crazy Left is a new thing is making the Weather Underground sad…
Well the surviving ones anyway, such as college professors/Obama boosters Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
No one actually believes it. It’s just a convenient hitching post to tie radical leftism to.
Sadly some do believe it and they are being used by political people instead of given help.
Same with the “trans” nonsense and so much more.
I disagree with this profoundly.
Social sanction against immorality is a good thing, when the system of morality is a good one. Social sanction against sluts kept the illegitimacy rate down. As soon as the social stigma was removed, illegitimacy rates soared.
I do not think that social and legal enforcement of traditional sexual morality, which worked, is equivalent to the Nazis. You seem to disagree. I think that your view is a major contributing cause with respect to the horrific moral decline in our country. About 40% of kids are now illegitimate, and it’s over 70% of black kids.
I even think that your view is a substantial contributing factor to the current Wokeist insanity. For some reason, people stopped imposing social sanction on perverts and freaks. Now we’re hip deep in perverts and freaks, and they’re starting to persecute anyone who still objects.
Well, there were also government financial incentives added, which made illegitimacy more feasible for more people.
It is possible to disapprove of something without exercising wanton cruelty. Would you have joined a group of students chanting ‘Suzy is a Slut’ at a pregnant girl?
In Goethe’s Faust, the female protagonist Gretchen, after finding that she is pregnant by Faust, is talking with her awful friend Lieschen, who (still unaware of Gretchen’s situation) is licking her chops about the prospect of humiliating another girl (Barbara) who has also become pregnant outside of marriage. Here’s Gretchen, reflecting on her own past complicity in such viciousness:
How readily I used to blame
Some poor young soul that came to shame!
Never found sharp enough words like pins
To stick into other people’s sins
Black as it seemed, I tarred it to boot
And never black enough to suit
Would cross myself, exclaim and preen–
Now I myself am bared to sin!
There’s a lot of this…”sharp enough words like pins to stick in other people’s sins”, combined with the pleasure of preening, going on today. And many if not most practitioners thereof will, unlike Gretchen, likely never repent.
See my related post Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism.
I gently disagree. Obama’s incubation of domestic terrorist training camps and assembling of rosters was the key ingredient in today’s public troubles.
Acorn/OFA/Occupy = BLM.
No, there’s not.
Are you into evolutionary psychology.