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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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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.
Ding
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.
Ding Ding!! And Stalin and Mao say hello…..the right of course has its “crazies” but none of the right’s crazies has any power nor have they ever ( the left loved them some Hitler in the 30’s and claimed him one of their own…..they can try to erase it but the truth is out there) the left’s crazies are present in all the houses of power….just because some like David French et al think that is just a conspiracy theory does not make it so…..as a teacher I live it every day…..
On the point of Trump’s election being when the left went crazy…Gary et al must not remember that the media were saying the same things about Regan he is saying about Trump……
I think if we were hip deep in perverts and freaks there would be less illegitimacy and more… nevermind.
Since 2009 or so, I have been semi-retired. So I have had the time to read up on a lot of history.
I was amazed to find out that King Louis the XVI had made many attempts to shift the policies governing the finances of the French nation to reduce debt and restore stability. He was much less of a problem than the members of the nobility.
However nothing that this king attempted to do could re-arrange the massive amounts of debt that had taken place during the events of the 1770’s, when so much debt was created to allow nobility to lead lives of decadent hedonism. In fact, the next time a nation’s GDP to debt level would end up being so off kilter would be when the USA government Bailed Out its Too Big To Fail Banking and Insurers’ crowd. (With AIG serving as a pass through for Goldman Sachs.)
Although this king had a greater understanding of the nation’s problems than his father and grandfather had, he still lost the throne in 1789 and went on to lose his head in 1793.
I was also amazed to find out that modern sociologists place some of the blame for the French Revolution on the shift from mothers breast feeding their babies to following the “fashionable trend” of hiring women to do this for them. This trend began around 1748 or so. Very well-off nobility had these surrogate mothers living with their family in their mansions. But less affluent parents would take a ride out to the country and drop the baby off with its surrogate mother.
Some of these “breasts for hire” took in more infants than they could possibly provide milk for. Babies died from dehydration, malnutrition, and neglect.
But the ones who survived and went on to adult hood might well have been emotionally and psychologically stunted from such an arrangement. Is there a connection between the unruly irrational mobs of 1789 and the lack of maternal attachment that had come about in their collective infancies?
Yes, and the other part of the equation for any member of The Left is that even if you know some phenomenon is not real, if your admitting to that knowledge out loud might cause those who do believe in the reality of non-reality to have their feelings hurt, you are supposed to keep quiet.
The guiding principle is that an individual should first consider someone else’s discomfort, and do nothing at all to upset those people. Even if not upsetting them means abandoning logic and rational behaviors.
Elizabeth, I am glad to see you calling out Gov Newsom’s crazy policies for my state.
What makes this even worse was that one of the first pronouncements from Biden’s mouth after entering the Oval Office was his desire to make the policies of the governor of California a guideline for what he is planning for our entire nation.
Regarding the US, I think this has been ratcheting for a century, and goes back further than that. But using the ratchet analogy, at first it takes a lot of force to turn the stuck nut and the ease is very low, then less force, then little force, then it’s so easy you can turn it the nut with your fingers, and finally you can spin it with one finger and it easily keeps spinning on its own until it flies off. Evil gets exponentially easier over time, generation by generation (with wobbles). What we see today is that same thing we saw in the 60s, and the 50s, and the 20s and that further back than that, it’s just easier, faster and exponentially accelerating.
So Maher is right that there wasn’t an identical crazy wing ten or twenty years ago, but he’s wrong to think that there wasn’t a crazy wing at all. He just doesn’t wish to see is that it was there in a milder, and for him a more acceptable, form. Now the nut is spinning off the bolt and he sees it’s about to come loose and he’s shocked.
And it’s not like Maher hasn’t been helping it along for years…
Yes, and now he’s shocked. Shocked!
I think that you’re incorrect, mathematically. Illegitimacy is reported as a rate – the percent of children who are illegitimate. This can increase even as homosexuality and trans cause the number of pregnancies to decline. Morality would be continuing to break down among both heterosexuals and others.
This fits the observations. The fertility rate is down, too.
I find this to be a strawman argument, David.
I do think that you are correct in warning against taking joy in disapproving of bad behavior. However, focusing of the “viciousness” of such disapproval undermines the case for disapproving, I think.
My own observation is that the sexually immoral are outraged at objections, no matter how mildly or politely the objection is phrased.
Actually George Carlin did a lot of the same.
And same with the Monty Python crew! They spent decades chipping away at the foundation and are now stunned that the edifice is unstable.
I have never heard of Jewish space lasers. What the hell?
They keep it pretty quiet.
Their orbits are circumscribed?
Maybe it’s because they were dealing with British politics but I don’t think it’s the same as Maher, Carlin, and others like them.
I’ve been wondering about that as well, KE. Monty Python certainly savaged institutions, everything from the church to the military to the police to the academy. It feels different to me: I grew up greatly enjoying Monty Python’s surreal humor, whereas Carlin never much appealed to me (though I admit he’s funny), and I actively dislike Maher’s brand of smirk.
One of the things the Python crew particularly dislikes is cancel culture and the suppression of humor that some find objectionable. I’m with them on that, and with anyone who shares that sentiment.
What a provocative non sequitur.
Maybe I’m too smart for some of this…
But when, for example, they had the “angry marching” of soldiers bit, I thought they were making fun of “the homosexual lifestyle” not the military.
Yes, gays in the military was a recurring theme. And, while they did poke fun at gays, I think that was also intended to poke fun at the military.
Maybe to the extent that the military would fall victim to or even directly accept that kind of stupidity. But I don’t think Python made that part any worse than it would have been anyway just because of the stupidity of the left.
I only want people who vote conservative or libertarian and who can pay more in taxes than they take in in various welfare policies.
“[S]omeone not schooled in the art of the lie.” Did you mean Donald J. Trump? If so, I think I am going to go cut myself.
It depends on what you call a lie. If you mean an attempt to deceive for the purpose of getting people to agree to something that’s not true, then GW Bush’s weapons of mass destruction wasn’t a lie (if he himself was deceived). Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” was a lie. 0bama’s “If you like your insurance you can keep your insurance” was a lie. Trump’s inaugural “This is the biggest crowd in the history of DC” was not a lie. Trump’s accusation that Cruz’s father was an assassination conspirator was a lie — along with one other election lie that I can’t recall now. Trump’s “my good friend Xi” was not a lie. Trump’s “I have a bigger button” wasn’t a lie. But in office Trump never deceived to mislead people in order to get them to agree to anything that I can think of.
Maybe you can name one attempt by Trump to deceive while in office.
In fairness, part of Trump’s charm, in my opinion, was that he was an artless liar. That is, he was a promoter, not a seducer. He sometimes oversold, but he came into office telling us just what he intended to do, and he either did those things or tried and was stymied in his efforts.
I commented on this here: A Brief Point About Political Dishonesty
Y’all take care now.
One very serious attempt to deceive in office: (A bunch of lies that constituted an attempt to steal the election) – He said that massive fraud was responsible for his losing the election. This was and is a lie that he attempted to perpetrate on the American people while in office. He then, using this lie as his reasoning, attempted to pressure state Republican officials to certify that he had actually won, not the person who won the most votes in those states. He then attempted to have various GOP legislators in various states send a competing set of electors to DC for the official certification on December 14, 2020. He failed. He continued to lie to us saying that the election was stolen and then unsuccessfully pressured his VP to throw sand in the gears of the counting of votes on January 6, 2021.
Gary Jr. Who knew there were two of them?
Neither of us knows exactly what goes on in President Trump’s head, but I find it entirely plausible that he actually believes that the election was stolen in the traditional sense of through fraudulent voting and counting. Millions of Americans believe that as well, and not entirely without reason. I don’t actually think there’s enough data available to say conclusively whether or not they are correct. In any case, if he believes it then it really isn’t a “lie.”
I’m not aware of him attempting to pressure state Republican officials to turn in fraudulent results, as you suggest. Rather, I recall him asking for careful recounting and auditing. Justified or not (and I’m open to the possibility that it was justified), that’s not the same as asking for fraud to be committed on his behalf, though I think that’s how it’s been spun.
I don’t think he broke the law, and I don’t actually believe that he lied. I think he overstated his case, but I suspect he actually believed what he was saying. Again, no one can know.
For what it’s worth, I am confident that the election was stolen, though I’m not sure it was stolen in the traditional way. I think it was stolen through collusion (remember when that word had some punch to it?) on the part of media and big tech, through deliberate and grossly dishonest censorship and suppression of pro-Trump voices. I also think what several states did at the last minute, in terms of election law changes, was probably illegal — and quite possibly determinative of the outcome. In that sense, the election may well have been stolen in something akin to the traditional sense, through criminal misconduct.
That wouldn’t surprise me at all.