What Is the Point Of Bill Maher?

And you wonder why the left catches more jokes from me?

They changed, not me.

Okay, I mean, they left me, I didn't leave them.

I mean, I'm the same.

It's not me who changed.

Yeah, I feel I'm the same guy.

What a thing to say that, like, you've not changed.

My god, if in 20 years I defend my career by saying I've not changed, fucking put me out of my misery, kill me.

Hi, I'm an American centrist.

I was socially ahead of the curve.

Until one time, I was asked to challenge my own pre-existing beliefs on something.

Now, I spend my days shaking my fist at people younger than me, making fun of minorities, and smoking a lot of weed.

That was kind of my impersonation of Bill Maher.

Do you guys think that was accurate?

Yeah, I, you know, if at the end you could give a like,

a pithy little little smirk.

Also, lately, he does a like, he'll be like, the left.

And he like snaps his mouth shut like a turtle and shoots his face at the camera.

I'm obsessed with his ticks.

Like, I know his ticks, even.

Last month, I was home with my liberal-identifying Democrat voting extended family when one of them said to me, I love Bill Maher.

He tells it like it is.

Over the last three decades, comedian and political talk show host Bill Maher has established himself as what he calls an old school liberal.

He's also established himself as the sane representative voice of the American left, someone who's bravely willing to criticize not just Republicans and conservatives, but also his own side.

He's not woke, he's pragmatic.

He's not emotional, he's logical.

He knows how to make Democrats win, chiefly by abandoning trans people or Palestinians or whatever variable group of minorities he personally doesn't care about at any given time, if only those gender-confused, loony leftists would listen to him.

This is a very theatrical performance.

I like it.

In those three decades of telling us what's best for us, he's amassed a reported net worth of $140 million

and climbing.

with Newsweek reporting that his current salary at HBO earns him $10 million a year.

I'm being snarky, I know, but I think Bill Maher is in some ways more parasitic to the American political media ecosystem than even some openly far-right figures like Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro, both of whom Bill has gleefully collaborated with, by the way.

When you tune into those people's shows, they're not really lying to you about where they fall on the political spectrum.

Whereas with Bill Maher, he clings to this identity as the last sane voice on the left, even when he's saying the exact same things about queer people or quote, liberal indoctrination on campuses as Charlie Kirk did.

Colleges completely out of control, elite universities where the kids are raised to be these

anarchist America-hating anti-Semites.

And so in that way, he's creating a path for entirely other groups of people who think of themselves as liberal or progressive, people like the one in my extended family, to adopt far-right, bigoted beliefs without necessarily realizing they're abandoning what they think are their progressive principles.

So that's kind of what I want to talk about today.

And to do that, I am so excited.

I have two people here, and I initially reached out to Francesca Fiorentini of the progressive comedy podcast, The Habituation Room.

Francesca, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

And I was like, I've seen, you know, you critique Bill Maher in ways that I thought were really thoughtful.

And I said that you're his foremost critic.

And you responded and you said, I am not his foremost critic, which is how I learned that there is currently in existence a podcast that has been running for over a year called I Hate Bill Maher, whose host, Will Weldon, is on a very last minute notice.

also here.

Will, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

It is, you know, just hearing like, you know, I found out this other guy, he had a podcast dedicated to this.

It's been running for well over a year.

I had never heard of it before.

That is, what a great summation of like all my entire body of work of somebody being like, you know, there's this other guy.

Nobody's ever heard of him before, but he's here now.

Will, I just want to ask before we get started, like, I started going through your body of work.

How did you conceive of this idea of making this very in-depth podcast for now that's been running for, I think, 18 months about Bill Maher?

To start, everything else I've ever done has, I would say by most fair measures, been a failure.

So I was like, well, this can't fail any worse than anything else I've ever done.

So like, why not?

I've just been at home for a while.

I'm essentially like a house husband.

And like, I had all this time.

I'm like, how much money does I was like, I've got the stuff lying around to do a podcast that sounds bad.

I'll do five episodes.

If I gain any sort of traction, I'll just keep doing it.

And it's just like, I hate him is why I do it.

That's actually the short answer.

That's what I should have led with.

I hate him.

The idea of like, you know, say going back in time and not doing harm to someone, but.

maybe erasing their career from existence, you know?

What I'm hearing is you're trying to cancel him.

He should literally be canceled because his show has no value to anyone.

Like, it shouldn't be like a canceled from like, oh, I'm canceled.

An executive should be like, the show's over.

Go home.

No, you want to annul Bill Maher.

We want to culturally annul him.

And I think that is very reasonable.

And I understand there are worse people that have existed throughout history, but it's the kind of thing where there'll be just one person who gets under your skin.

Like

what you're saying about like Candace Owens, I understand Candace Owens is like worse, but for a long time I was like, but if I could erase anybody's media career, it would be Jonathan Chade.

Like I understand he's not the worst, but he's the one who bothers me personally more than anyone else.

And I think he's a good comparison because he's someone else who is kind of spiraling now that he's discovered his lifelong political project and political beliefs have failed.

Like they have delivered us to this moment in time, and he's just coping with it a lot better than Bill Maher does.

Did that answer the question?

I don't really remember.

I mean, Will and I are comedians, and also, like, I don't call myself a political comedy comedian, but I do talk about politics on stage.

And I think that something I've spoken with Will about extensively is the amount of like air in the like political comedy space that someone like Maher still takes up.

And for people who are quite a bit younger or people coming up, it's like it is really insane that this show being as bad as it is, I mean, on every level, on literally every level, that Bill Maher being such a bad comedian is still getting $10 million a year to do this show.

I really, you know, I'm too old to be able to sincerely embrace saying things like, well, as an, as someone who is like neurodivergent, like I struggle with the idea of saying like, well, maybe it is like just the way my brain works, but for whatever reason, I'm obsessed with rules and and order.

I want fundamentally things to make sense.

And the big thing about him is, it's like, this doesn't make sense.

It's like not right.

It's not right that a guy who has been wrong over and over and over, who lies, doesn't know, he's either stupid or intentionally dishonest.

He's a creep, like a nasty, sick creep.

All of that stuff.

And like, he's still here.

And in my brain, I can't, I can't wrap my head around the fact that that can happen.

Like, there must be consequences for being bad at what you, my whole life.

I've been taught, like, if you do a bad job at something, there will be consequences.

And then you look at a guy like that, and it's an extension of anyone who reaches a certain level of like prominence and power where it's just like, it's not okay that this continues to happen.

God, Will.

You act like you just moved to LA.

The worst people in media, and I think in Hollywood, often are the ones that rise to the top.

And Bill Maher occupies a very particular nexus of both media and comedy.

But I digress.

Well,

I do think you answered the question.

I think I feel like I answered a few questions, most of which were not asked, but.

Shall we, as we do on this podcast, get into the chronology of Bill Maher's career?

I have a teeny bit of early life stuff here because I know we want to get into like what Bill Maher is up to now, but we have to establish first who he was and how he established himself as someone with credibility sort of in comedy, in progressive politics, and any of this.

So Bilma grows up in New Jersey.

Shout out New Jersey, me too.

Love that for us.

He was raised Catholic, but when he was 13, his father sort of ushered them away from the religion due to his disagreement with the church's stance on abortion.

And I think this is one of those early childhood things that shapes Bill Maher's belief system.

Bilma goes to Cornell University in the 70s, where he says selling pot helped him get through college and start doing comedy.

And his love of pot is another thing that will help shape his belief system and, you know, supposed progressivism.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, Bill Maher does stand-up comedy in New York City.

He takes on small roles in TV and film, makes appearances on David Letterman and Johnny Carson, and eventually lands his own show, Politically Incorrect, which was a late-night political talk show, first on Comedy Central, then on ABC in 1993.

Very important about him growing up is everybody hated him in school.

He had no friends.

He talks about how he was bullied via being ostracized, which like,

you know.

Well,

I mean, like, I don't know, I always hear about these figures who become like so, just so mean, right?

Like, I think what I want to really identify about Bill Maher's politics early on is just that he's really mean.

And a lot of the people that he's mean to, like queer people, like we were also badly bullied in school.

We also, most of us had no friends.

And so, you know, it's at some point you have to take that upon yourself.

The other thing, too, is his mother is Jewish.

He didn't know until his late teens.

And he talks a lot about how impressed he is with his dad for marrying the Jewish woman he was actually in love with instead of the woman everybody probably wanted him to marry, which I understand.

It's like that would have been pre-Vatican II, so Catholics weren't like wild about the Jewish people.

Now he talks all the time about how also the most painful thing that's ever happened to him was when his high school girlfriend broke up with him.

To date?

To date.

To date.

In 70 years, the most painful thing that ever happened to him was his high school girlfriend breaking up with him.

That followed by the second most painful thing, which is a teenage autistic person on Tumblr using neo-pronouns.

See, I've got jokes too.

I get the comedians on my podcast, and now we're all making jokes.

Keith Olberman has a story about how in college, Bill Maher had his own comedy magazine.

There was the Cornell comedy magazine, and then there was the one Bill Maher wrote and published himself because The implication is he, they wouldn't let him write for the other one.

He's just like a guy who was always on the the outside growing up.

But he also always thought he was, he clearly always thought he was smarter than everybody else.

I think I sent you the clips, but like he talks about how like he never liked kids.

He never liked kids.

He never wanted to make kids laugh.

He didn't like kids stuff.

He wanted to make the adults laugh.

He also started off trying to be an actor before he got politically.

He did stuff, I think, for Leno.

He like covered an election and that led to politically incorrect.

But prior to that, like he was on a sitcom with Gina Davis called Sarah.

He was the star of the film Pizzaman, which was written and directed by the, I think, original writer of Pretty Woman.

We're going to do the opposite of Pretty Woman.

Pizzaman.

Like he comes out of the like, the like makeover scene looking worse.

It cannot be said enough.

Like if I had a dollar for every time one of these people who ends up being just like, and I mean, this is where we're going, right?

Like right-wing provocateurs, which is certainly not what Bill Maher would call himself today, but it is basically what he is.

If I had a dollar for every time one of those people started out wanting to be an actor, listener, please let me know in the comments if you want that to be its own episode.

I was talking with Caroline Kwan about making an episode about that specifically.

It's so many people, it's just about like their rejection from you know, progressive artistic spaces and they're like wanting to exact revenge on those types of people.

I mean, Ronald Reagan.

Sure, Shapiro.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I want to talk about a couple of the beliefs that Bill Maher really espouses at the beginning of his career that solidify him as just this like raw, real liberal.

One of his hallmark beliefs is that he will criticize religion.

Some religions.

Bill Maher has

called religion a, quote, neurological disorder.

In 2008, famously, he releases a documentary called Religilists, which to this day is one of the highest-grossing documentaries in the United States.

Jesus.

Well, it's not a

heavy hitter list.

People don't go to those in the theater very much.

But, you know, like, I want to say, like, Bill Maher, I was watching, you know, old Bill Maher preparing for this.

I was watching a lot of Bill Maher.

Every time I make this podcast, I just fucking destroy my YouTube recommended algorithm.

Oh, no, I'm sorry now.

Bill Maher, you know, he was like spitting some facts early on about how, you know, like churches receive public services, but don't pay taxes, like stuff like that.

That as a very young person, like made a lot of sense to me.

He would like poke and prod at theology in general and like the idea that like maybe God's not real.

And as a kid, I grew up, you know, going to a conservative synagogue.

Like those were things that like, I was like, oh, that, that makes sense to me.

And also when he's like, I don't like religion, he means the Abrahamic religions.

Like, I've never heard him talk about, you know, like Buddhism or Hinduism or, but ranking them, he dislikes Islam the most, then Christianity, and he, like, very rarely criticizes Judaism.

Uh, and that when he does, it tends to be like a lot more lighthearted, which is weird because, like, he doesn't know anything about it.

Like, there are episodes where he'll be like, Shabbat, what's that?

It's like, you don't know what Shabbat is.

His religious stuff is hard to parse because there are times where it feels like just a shield to dislike, I mean, not just Muslims, but just brown people generally.

But also, like, especially during the Bush years, he also hates Christianity.

Like, he, Christianity, he really does.

He's like, it's wrecking the country.

His thing is, Muslims are trying to kill us.

Christians are wrecking America.

Those are sort of his two stances on religion during the Bush years.

Right.

And one of those is true and the others is absolutely not.

I mean, what's interesting about Bill Maher, you know, being so loudly and proudly secular and anti-religion, like it is at a time when the Christian right is rising in this country full on, full force.

And I think being a product maybe of like the Reagan years as like a young Gen X, I feel like that does something to you.

And it matters that you're speaking out about it because of all the power that the right is gaining.

And so it is wild because it's like the right and the Christian right hasn't lost power since he first started calling it out.

I think the only thing that's happened is people who keep calling it out maybe are tired of their material about the same shit because nothing tangibly changes.

Anyway,

we can talk about that a little bit later, but just to give him a little bit of props for like,

it is important to track the rise of that.

They are hate mongers.

They are ruining the country.

They are religious zealots.

But it's almost like you're not in their crosshairs, my guy.

It's people that you later in life don't even see as your ally.

Bill Maher also, he does something that a lot of people I've noticed who leave religion and especially leave like religious cults do,

which is they conflate their belief that organized religion is bad or predatory or any number of things with a rejection of any strong belief in anything in general.

It's like, it's all bad.

Where I think this is really pronounced is Megan Phelps Roper, who was, she grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church, like that was her family.

And then she grew up and she left the Westboro Baptist Church and she wrote a book about it.

And I think she follows me on Twitter, but probably won't after hearing this.

But Megan Phelps Roper, do you guys remember that podcast series that J.K.

Rowling did with the free press, the witch trials of J.K.

Rowling?

Oh, God.

Oh, God.

The premise of that podcast series was that J.K.

Rowling is being tried at the stake by the, you know, woke, cultish gender ideologues, aka like trans people wanting human rights.

That was hosted by Megan Phelps Roper, who basically talked about trans people and their allies as if it were a religion not unlike the Westboro Baptist Church.

I think I've spoken about this on my podcast before, but like there was one time a couple of years ago where I went on a date with someone who came out of a really extreme Christian childhood, who after a couple of dates, I was like, I don't think I can do this because he similarly, towards me and my own political beliefs, he was like, well, you believe strongly in something.

That reminds me of my childhood and those religious people who believed strongly in something.

Any strong belief is bad.

And so, you know, he was just pushing back on everything I said about anything, which didn't make for the most pleasant dinners.

I find Bill Maher does this similar to Megan Phelps Roper.

He does it with trans people.

He does it, I think, with the left left generally, where he talks about, especially now, the left as if it's like a cult or a religion.

I do think that that was the whole problem with, you know, being anti-religion in the Bush years and saying that Islam is exactly like Christianity and all and on and on and on, is that he is having these arguments theoretically in his mind.

It is all in a Petri dish.

It is all in a vacuum.

It's not actually based in, oh my God, we've invaded two Muslim-majority countries with with our military, effectively for, you know, Dick Cheney's stock portfolio.

Like it was completely devoid of everything.

It was just like, I'm going to flatten it all.

And Muslims are just as bad and have just as much power.

And it's like, no, they don't, man.

Like terrorism is bad.

It's also an act of desperation.

It's also.

put in a broader scheme of history and colonialism.

And I also think that, you know, you get a lot of, you know, in activist movements, they're undercovers, right?

There are people who are work with the FBI fbi and whatnot and some of them and their origin story is that they went to an activist meeting right and they got upset because of how committed people were you know they felt like they were you know radical they were organizing for a campaign for a group of people they were serious and that

I think for really weak-willed cowards, that is terrifying to them.

And I would put Bill Maher in that category of like FBI informant vibe.

That's what he has.

Yeah, I am, I think he's driven a lot by resentment about being like left behind.

There was a long time where he was like hip.

And I think the fact that people's views have evolved and his weren't caused his to regress as opposed to him just staying in time.

He was like, well, they're crazy.

So I have to act in opposition to that.

And then people started criticizing him.

And because he is the pettiest, most vengeful person in entertainment, he like got even worse about everything to the point where now he'll be like, I'm a liberal.

And it's like, well, when was the last time you advocated for a liberal thing?

You can't find it anymore.

He doesn't do it.

There's no, there's no economic policy behind what he believes.

Like it's all crazy to him.

Everything they want to do is crazy and they just need to be reasonable.

But he can't, he has no examples of what he's talking about.

There is something to be said about a stand-up comedy as an art form, which is having an angle, right?

You can't just get up there and, you know, not have an interesting thing to say.

You want to have a certain angle.

It's got to be funny, right?

And it is, obviously, we see it's very easy to like punch down.

And we were in the middle of the rise of, you know, sort of like, you know, Edgelord humor as an Edgelord president, you know, rules us.

But I think it's also Bill Maher is a product of not actually being funny or talented, but knowing that you just have to have

an anti-something angle.

He is a professional contrarian.

I wouldn't say that all stand-ups are contrarians professionally, but there has to be something a little contrarian in your setup or in your joke to make it funny.

That's how the, that's where the humor lies.

But if you were that with everything,

so I think to Will's point, it's like he like, he like knee-jerk reacts to the times.

He doesn't go with it.

He's react, knee-jerk reacting because he thinks that's what humor is.

That's what comedy is, and it's not.

Part of my job, a big part of my job, is understanding where other people are at with their politics.

And a huge part of that is understanding where they're getting their information.

I think this entire episode is evidence of us trying to understand that.

For example, New York City's mayoral debate just happened, and there is pretty broad agreement that Zoron kind of steamrolled Andrew Cuomo.

That is, of course, not how every news source is going to report it, especially those with an ideological bent that demonizes Zoran Mamdani, who famously threatens the power of billionaires.

This is where Ground News comes in.

Ground News is a website and an app that aggregates articles from all different publications about a single story and organizes them into left, right, and center biases and gives you so many other transparency tools that make it easier to understand the information diets of not just you, but your extended family, your Facebook uncle.

So I wanted to see how right-leaning news outlets were covering the New York City mayoral debate.

And here's some articles that Ground News aggregated for me.

Cuomo strikes at Momdani while Sleewa goes on the attack in fiery debate over New York City's mayor race.

Huh, that's not totally what I saw.

What I don't have in experience, I make up for in integrity, and what you don't have in integrity, you could never make up for in experience.

From the New York Post, Zoran Momdani dodges attacks and can't say how he'll pay for socialist proposals in heated New York City mayoral debate.

Zoran Mom Dani, to be clear, has said many times over and over again how he'd pay for his proposals like free and fast buses, which is taxing billionaires and corporations appropriately.

Here's another one.

Zoran Mom Dani's artist wife skips New York City mayoral debate to teach ceramics class in trendy Brooklyn Bistro.

Okay.

You know, to me, these run the gamut from misleading to downright ridiculous, but this is a really important tool for me to understand where, frankly, a lot of people, for better and for worse, are getting their information.

If you would like to subscribe to Ground News, you can head over to ground.news slash fruity for 40% off a vantage plan that is ground.news slash fruity.

Get smarter about not only the way you take in information, but the way that you understand how other people are receiving their news.

Thank you so much to Ground News for sponsoring this episode.

And now let's get back to the show.

Another one of Bill Maher's more, you know, modern iterations of his brand that he's really taken to, I think in an effort to uphold this like liberal cool guy thing is just that he likes to smoke weed.

He like it's the premise of his podcast is that he smokes weed on the podcast.

I don't really have a lot to say about this.

I don't smoke weed.

It makes me paranoid.

Well, weed, I grew up, you know, smoking a lot of weed in high school, and it made me a much more,

I mean, it was like, that's your gateway to Marley.

Marley, you know, you start, you start talking about social justice through that.

You got the posters in your dorm room, and then 9-11 happens, and you live in New York, and then you get involved in the anti-war movement.

The point is, for me, weed made me an empath.

We'd made me a hippie.

Weed made me very connected.

And I only in like the last 10 years have I realized that like, oh, you know, the Rogan, the Elons, like people who smoke weed don't actually become empathetic.

Like I have a very upsetting amount of empathy when I'm high.

It like, it's like too much and I need to calm down.

But a lot of people don't.

A lot of people are like, you know, fuck yeah.

They're just chilling and happy.

They don't think twice about anything.

And so I think it's also, but it's also so lame to be like, smoking weed makes me cool.

He's like, what is he?

He brings out fucking bubblers.

Like, you're so corny.

I don't know what a bubbler is.

I don't think he does.

You don't think he what?

You don't think he smokes weed?

He just smokes joints.

Okay.

He'll be like, anybody who eats unhealthy food deserves to die.

And then he will pump his lungs full of carcinogens and be like, I will never die.

I'm the healthiest guy in the world.

But also, he can't roll his own joints.

He had to get Bella Thorne to roll a joint for him on the most disturbing episode of Club Random there is.

He can't, though.

He has never rolled a joint on the show.

They're always pre-rolls, which if weed's going to be that big a part of your identity, you have to be able to roll a joint.

This is the most podcast my podcast has ever been.

Like we're talking about, we're talking about another person's ability to roll or not roll joints.

Like this is, this is why I got into the medium, guys.

I will say, it's like, there is a long period of time where he would talk about weed in the context of people go to jail for this and that's wrong.

Like there was a period of time where he was concerned about mass incarceration.

A lot of the issues he was good on for so many things like when he would talk about gay marriage, he would be the most homophobic ally you could.

Yes.

He'd be like, oh, gay guys, they love putting things in their butts.

You're gay?

Ass sex.

Like that constantly making jokes about people being gay, having sex in the ass.

But then he'd have a Democrat on and he would go, look, it makes sense that Republicans aren't in favor of gay marriage.

They hate gay people.

You say you support gay people.

How can you also not support gay marriage?

So it's like on the bigger issues and on the bigger scheme, he would be like the only person on television who would sit someone down on an interview that theoretically should be friendly and be like, this makes no sense.

Justify this.

But once like...

Once gay marriage was not, well, it's in contention again, but like once a lot of those huge, broad issues were quote unquote settled, he didn't move on.

He now is just like, well, we're good.

We did it.

And now I'm going to be even worse.

Yeah.

And

we're going to get back to his whole thing that he repeats constantly, which is, I haven't changed.

They have.

And it's like, well,

part of being progressive is that you should be able to change.

Yeah, progress denotes a certain motion forward, I feel like.

That's what progress means as a word.

Right.

And like with so many people who become what Bill Maher has become, they got to a point politically and socially in the world where they felt like they had all of their needs covered and things were exactly as, you know, they were to make Bill Maher comfortable.

And so the work was done.

It was the same thing with, I did a whole episode about the conservative gay writer Andrew Sullivan who talked about how trans people are destroying the gay movement.

And it's like, he was like, well, we had everything and then the trans people ruined it.

And it's like, well, you had everything.

And the trans people are the reason that you had it.

Like,

yeah.

You know who loves Andrew Sullivan?

Bill Maher?

A guy named Bill Maher.

He's on, he's been on real time like 47.

The angriest I get is an episode with either Andrew Sullivan or David Fromm.

Those are the two episodes where I'm like, I don't know that this is listenable because I am like really getting mad in a way.

I'm getting mad the way conservatives get mad when they try to do comedy.

Speaking of those, you know, militant trans activists who got people like Andrew Sullivan and even, I would say, Bill Maher, the rights that they so cherish today.

Rest in peace, Miss Major, who is a black trans activist from the Stonewall era.

She was at the Stonewall the first night.

She said the cops were raiding the gay bars like they always do, and we just were sick of it.

And we, I think she said something to the effect of like, and we kicked their shit.

I was very fortunate to meet her last year, and she just passed away a few days ago.

Rest in power, Miss Major.

I want to keep going with the chronology.

In 2003, Bill Maher launches Real Time with Bill Maher, a political talk show which has now aired 700 episodes.

And when I saw that, I just have to say, props to him because I just recently passed 50 episodes of A Bit Fruity.

And some days I feel like my brain is in a blender.

So credit where credit's due, Bill.

I just want to say I am happy happy sitting here with two other people who put actual work into their podcast, whose podcast requires a little bit of effort beyond like, we're going to talk about this.

You mean more effort than Bill Maher?

He puts no effort into his show, at least over the last, especially since COVID.

There are interviews where people are like, what's your average work week like?

He's like, oh.

It's crazy.

I work so much.

Oh, my God.

You know, I write the editorial at the end of the show.

So, you know, I'll write a draft on Monday.

Tuesday, I write a draft.

Wednesday, I write a draft.

Thursday, I write a draft.

And then Friday, we shoot.

It's like, hold on.

You're saying you do a ton of work writing a draft, one draft a day of a six-minute piece that I now know his writers also write for him.

Right, right.

This episode, as I say time and time again, is researched, written, filmed, edited, and produced.

by a one Matt Bernstein.

If you'd like to support it, you can do so.

The Patreon will be in the episode description.

Over more than two decades, Bill Maher has cultivated this brand, like I said, of a quote-unquote old school liberal.

I think there's a big difference between woke, and I know that word triggers a lot of people because it had a great beginning as a meaning, but words migrate and it went to something else.

I think there's a big difference between an old school liberal and a woke person.

And after watching a lot of Bill Maher and, like I said, ruining my YouTube algorithm forever, I have divided the next part of our episode into a few different beliefs that Bill Maher has made core to his identity on the show, especially in recent years.

But the first one I want to talk about has one that has really run

the entire span of his career, which is

Islamophobia, which is not an actual belief.

It's a form of bigotry.

But I do think it is the most significant pillar in his career.

It's also the most striking because to be an Islamophobe for decades and decades in the public eye just is a testament to how

okay American society is with open Islamophobia, how anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism are the last bastions of acceptable bigotry.

Totally.

And I think the last time someone really challenged him on his Islamophobia was in 2014 when Ben Afflick, of all fucking people, absolutely schooled him.

You're saying that Islamophobia is not a real thing.

That if you're critical of something.

Well, it's not a real thing when we do it.

Right.

Well,

it really isn't.

I'm not denying that certain people are bigoted against Muslims as people.

And that's a problem.

But the

hostile about this is gross.

It's racist.

It's not, but it's so natural.

It's like saying

shifty Jews.

You're not listening to what we are saying.

You guys are saying, if you want to be liberals, believe in liberal principles like freedom of speech.

Like, you know, we are endowed by our forefathers with an alien.

That's right.

All men are created.

No.

Ben, we have to be able to criticize bad ideas.

Of course we do.

No liberal doesn't want to criticize bad ideas.

But Islam is

the motherload of bad ideas.

Jesus.

So we have.

Or how about the more than a billion people who aren't fanatical, who don't punish men, who just want to go to the store,

don't say any of the things, but you're saying all Muslims.

No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, stereotype nonsense.

Wait, you take way to sad things, and you're painting the whole group religion.

We've killed more Muslims than they've killed us by an awful lot.

We've invaded more Muslims.

I am not from Marketing.

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.

We're not.

ISIS couldn't fill a AA ballpark in Charleston, West Virginia, and you were making a career out of ISIS.

And I really feel, and you guys tell me if I'm wrong, but I feel like if it weren't Islamophobia and if it were like nowadays, I feel like his career would have been ended by something like that.

That was resoundingly such a strikeout that

it's still shocking to me.

He keeps getting back up and writing the drafts of the drafts of the drafts.

One of his big things with Islamophobia, I mean, it's very, it is, of course, very centered around him, especially post-9-11.

I do think his biggest issue with 9-11 is it led to his firing.

Like, I think if you got him fucked up enough, he would admit that and be like, I lost my job because of the Muslims.

Can you explain that, though?

Politically incorrect was canceled because right afterwards uh he said he's like look they weren't cowards they weren't cowards the guys who stayed on the plane weren't cowards that doesn't take cowardice it takes bravery to follow through on something like that we are cowards because we launch cruise missiles from 2 000 miles away 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 that is say what you want about it not cowardly.

And like, as soon as he started getting heat for it, he walked it back and he's like, I didn't mean it the way it came out.

I didn't mean it the way it came out.

And it also reminds us of the moment that we're in right now, where if you don't mourn Charlie Kirk and all of his bigoted ways, then you're a terrorist or you're awful.

And, you know, the censorship regime after 9-11 was insane.

I remember liking Bill Maher as a young anti-war activist for sure.

And something like that.

Like, none of us were going around saying that kind of stuff.

But the show is called Politically Incorrect.

He wasn't wrong.

It was people were getting canceled left and right for saying similar, pretty lightweight things that had nothing to do with the moral judgment of what happened.

So it's funny because, yeah, he was based about it.

And I'm sure he's mad.

Or he had to swing so hard in the other direction and be like, oh, hey, guess what?

We'll never get you canceled.

It's being Islamophobic.

I think it's entirely driven around fear is mostly how it started.

Like he talked all the time about how they wanted to kill us.

It reminds me of like, I remember when like people will be like, like, ISIS wants to destroy America.

And it's like, ISIS is not, ISIS is on the other side of the world fighting a regional conflict.

Like, why is this about you?

A thing he loved to say before he somebody pulled him aside and was like, Saddam Hussein is a secular dictator is he'd be like, you know, the average man in Iraq would rather Saddam still be in power than see his sister walk down the street in a mini skirt.

But his.

concern for women under repressive regimes never extended any further than using them as a cudgel against a religious belief system he's fundamentally opposed to.

That's so liberalism.

Let's just stop down because that is liberalism because after 9-11 and during the Afghanistan war and Iraq wars, the liberals were able to get on board with Bush's plan because they were like, oh, we're freeing the women, right?

And in a very also Islamophobic way or, I mean, not fetishization, but like paternalism, right?

So that was the paternalism that the liberals, and I would put Bill Maher in there,

justified, even though he was against it, but he's ultimately making the same argument that liberals who were for it and voted for it were also making.

I will also say by season three of his show, he is not opposed to the Iraq War.

He's at that point going, he's like, look, I think it's bad that they lied to us to get us into it, but now can't we say maybe it'll be a good thing?

He'll be like, can't we see there's hope?

Can't we be like, maybe in 20 years, why can't liberals look to the future?

And And the guests on the show will be like, people are dying

by the thousands.

Like, it's, it's chaos.

You mentioned the thing with Ben Affleck.

The most important thing about that conversation is the next week, he was saying the exact same things as he was saying during the episode with Ben Affleck.

He has never internalized a thing a guest has said to him.

Hang on, Will.

I am sure he has internalized things that right-wingers have said to him.

You're 100% correct.

He has believed everything Barry Weiss has ever said to him is now a core tenet of his belief system.

But Francesca, what you were saying reminds me so much of the conversations we've been having over the last few years, a lot on this podcast about pink washing and this idea that like any amount of death committed unto Palestine with United States dollars via Israel is justified because at the end of the day, we'll be able to bring pride, gay pride to Gaza and we can plant a rainbow flag in the rubble as if it's this like humanistic murder that we're doing.

And Bill Maher does a lot of that early on in 2010 on his show.

He had this Muslim Dior sketch where he had women walk out in like a fashion show style, but covered in traditional Muslim clothing and would say things, you know, basically just demeaning them, but through the lens of like American liberalism of like, basically, if only you could take that off and be free.

Also that year, he had a segment where he complained to his fellow panelists about the rise in the baby name Muhammad in the UK.

Most popular name

in the United Kingdom, Great Britain, this was in the news this week, for babies this year was Muhammad.

Am I a racist to feel I'm alarmed by that?

Because I am.

And it's not because of the race, it's because of the religion.

I don't have to apologize, do I, for not wanting the Western world to be taken over by Islam?

And he basically would just, and this is something, another through line of his career, where he, not even softly, he just peddles great replacement theory.

He's like very concerned that like Muslims will take over the West.

Sharia law.

He compares Zane Malik of One Direction to the Boston Marathon bomber.

Zane Malik can just go ahead and quit One Direction for all I care.

Just tell me two things, Zane.

Which one in the band were you?

And where were you during the Boston Marathon?

Oh my god.

Yeah.

What?

Oh my God.

Will, you didn't know about that?

I found something you didn't know about.

There's so much.

There is so much.

There is so much.

There is so much.

Like I said, it's just, it's so, it's so mean.

And Ben Affleck points this out in 2014.

I mean, Bill Maher just treats all of the American and Western atrocities in majority Muslim countries as like an aberration of our ideology and of our core, you know, politics in the West, where, and it's something that has to be done, or else look, imagine what they could do to us.

Yes.

He is reacting to the fact that the country is turning on the Iraq war.

Like the country is actually humanizing Muslims around the world.

I mean, 2009, Barack Obama goes to Cairo and gives a speech.

It's a really momentous moment where people are starting to really humanize him.

And it's like he has to fly in the face of that, either because he truly is a bigot in his heart of hearts, but I also think, once again, he is a contrarian.

He's a piece of shit contrarian and he cannot read the room again, which is a little ironic because as a comic, you should read the room.

You should know what is hitting.

Well, as you said, he's a horrible comedian.

He's the worst comedian.

He's still throughout the 2023 genocide on Gaza.

Like he's doing the classic pink washing.

Like he carries it through his career where he says, after Chapel Roan advocated for Palestinians, Chapel Rohan, who's a lesbian, Bill Maher did a whole segment about hee hee haha, you'd be thrown straight off a roof if you were in Gaza, which is why we must continue to bomb them.

And, you know, what's interesting to me, though, is I was watching all of these segments throughout his career, but especially the ones early on, like in that clip with Ben Affleck, where he's insisting, I'm not discriminating against or, God forbid, dehumanizing Muslims.

But we see now, I mean, mean, you could see it then, but like we see the extent to which the post-9-11 dehumanization of Muslims and of Arab people more broadly allowed him to, just two weeks ago, so casually laugh about dead Palestinian children with Van Jones.

Iran and Qatar have come up with a disinformation campaign that they are running through TikTok and Instagram that is massive.

If you are a young person, you open up your phone and all you see is dead Gaza baby, dead guys, a baby, dead guys, baby, Diddy, dead guys a baby, dead guys a baby,

like that's basically

Van Jones rightfully fucking raked over the coals for this one.

It's also funny because Van Jones is like claiming in this clip that the reason young people are pro-Palestine is because of a paid social media campaign by Iran.

And then right after he went on Bil Mar, it was revealed that Van Jones himself is a mentor in a paid Zionist journalism program.

Yes, of course he is.

Yeah, I mean, but like, this is how dehumanization works, right?

Like, you're just arguing, well, like, you know, in the case of Bill Maher, he's like, well, no, I just want women to have their freedom.

But all of it was just about dehumanizing brown people so that when they are being genocided, your brain doesn't register it as like human life being destroyed.

Yeah, I mean,

dead baby after dead baby after dead baby.

The joke is then he says Diddy, that gets the laugh, but the setup that we're supposed to ignore is dead Palestinian baby over and over again, as if, and again, Van's implying that this is fake.

I think it's sad to, you know, that he didn't know his mom was Jewish or that he was Jewish till later in life, because I actually think Zionism is such a perfect like Cinderella story for a guy like like Bill Maher.

It is

all the surface liberal issues, like you're saying, like, okay, we support gay marriage.

We think you should, you know, smoke weed and listen to music.

And we're not, you know, religious zealots, but we fundamentally hate Arabs and Muslims.

And that is like the core tenet of a lot of what Zionism has maybe always was, has certainly become that cruelty.

It just squares so much with who he is.

You're talking about dehumanization.

I found him to be a fundamentally anti-human person.

You know, he'll do a joke in the monologue where he'll be like, oh, in Iraq, you know, they found

three severed heads.

Three guys were murdered by insurgents.

They had their heads cut off.

They found them by the side of the road.

Don't these guys know trash pickup is on Wednesdays?

And the crowd will be like, ugh.

And then he'll get mad at the crowd.

And it's like, oh, you're, you're so lacking in any sort of empathy for human life that you can't understand that like a crowd is going to hear that.

And the crowd is going to go, oh, my God,

those poor people were horrifically murdered.

And he's literally sitting there going, oh, my God, it's a joke.

Calm down.

And it's like, yeah, but like those were real people.

He died.

And the craziest example, right after Charlie Kirk was killed.

So he had Ben Shapiro on.

And that was Ben Shapiro's was, this is the fault of the left.

He had it on Tim Alberta, who was like, everybody's too crazy.

Bill Maher was like, the people who are celebrating it.

And on the right, the people who are calling for blood.

I don't like any of you.

He's so brave.

They talk about this for like 20 minutes.

Ben Shapiro is like, I watched this kid grow up.

I've known him since he was a kid.

I watched him grow up.

And to see that happen to him.

And like, it's very like somber and emotional and angry.

And then Bill Maher's like, okay.

Now here's a segue.

This crazy thing happened.

And then he segues to like a wacky comedy bit.

And he's doing the jokes and it's cutting to Ben Shapiro being like, like laughing.

And I'm like, what the fuck is this?

Like, you were just talking about how horrified you were by the murder of this guy you watched grow up.

And now you're like cackling at this horrific comedy bit.

You're guffawing.

It's like RoboCop.

Like his show has become like RoboCop, where you watch it and you go, well, none of this means anything.

And it's the same thing.

He'll have some...

intense interview with somebody and they'll come back and you'll be like, okay, our next story is somebody fucked a cow in Iowa.

Oh, Oh, I wonder if it stained the leather.

And you're like, what the fuck, man?

I'm going insane from watching this because I no longer believe in like tone or meaning or like anything has value.

I have to be honest, the thing that I kind of like about Bill Maher, I've written packets for Bill Maher.

I'm sure a lot of maybe Will.

Did you ever write a packet for Bill Mapp?

We talked about this.

I wrote a really good writing packet for Bill Maher.

Wait, what does that mean?

What is a packet in this context?

You submitted to become a writer, to get hired as a writer.

To get hired as a writer.

Oh, you guys applied?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God.

Wait, maybe this podcast is its own version of like a grievance thing about you not getting hired by Bill Maher.

We're just pissed.

Well, they don't hire female writers, so I'm not that,

you know, not that burned by it.

But it was interesting to tap into your inner Bill Maher is like trying to write in his voice is just like, what if you were, you know, an unrepentant dipshit and you just wrote, you know, offending everybody.

And there is something kind of fun about not holding anything precious, right?

And I would liken it a little bit to I think Bill Burr, although the Riyadh post-Riyadh Comedy Festival, I think he's sort of jumped the shark here.

But he also, he doesn't really hold anything precious.

He'll make fun of a lot of different people, but he definitely has a sense of power.

Like he's always talked about like billionaires and whatnot.

And I think Bill Maher

has no sense of where the power lies.

And that's why a lot of it isn't actually funny.

And I think this is what centrism also does is like you pretend like you are morally superior because you're above the conversation.

I also, before we move on to his next big belief, I think his relationship with Ben Shapiro is so interesting.

They collaborate a lot on each other's shows.

And I don't think it's interesting necessarily because it's bridging any sort of meaningful political divide.

I think that you can see very clearly when they work together that they basically just agree, which is very funny as Bill amar presenting it as reaching across the aisle when i'm like you guys are just holding hands you know i keep saying this is all very simple stop attacking israel stop attacking israel and then we won't be having these fights about when should we have a ceasefire which is always the day after israel attacks right no that's right and the amount of care that israel is taking by going house to house and street to street in the gaza strip to avoid civilian casualties only to be told they're committing a genocide is just it is sickening it's always been that.

It's always been that.

You know, Bill Amar's whole thing being like religion is stupid and people who guide their belief system through religion have a neurological disorder, Ben Shapiro is like America's foremost Jewish theocrat.

Like he says, like he isn't, he's an Orthodox Jew whose politics are guided by his religion.

I just want to give a quick shout out to Blue Land for sponsoring this show and for being the show's longest running sponsor.

Through all the trials and all the tribulations, you guys have never wavered.

I appreciate that.

I like my apartment to look nice.

If you're watching the video version, you can tell me how you think I'm doing.

I got a comment recently that that plant was underwatered.

I think it's watered just fine.

Thank you very much.

One of the ways that I help my apartment look nice, especially living in smaller spaces as we city dwellers so often do, is with the help of Blue Land.

Blue Land is a line of sustainable cleaning products on a mission to eliminate single-use plastic by reinventing cleaning essentials that are better for you and the planet with the same powerful clean you are used to.

All you do with Blue Land is buy one of their forever bottles, very chic, very nice.

Pop in a tablet of whatever cleaning solution you've bought, whether it's mirror cleaner, multi-purpose cleaner, bathroom cleaner, what have you.

Fill the bottle up with water, let the tablet dissolve, and you are good to go.

And when you run out, you just pop in a new tablet, and those refill tablets start for as low as two dollars and twenty five cents so not just better for you not just better looking than the other cleaning supplies on the market but pretty good on your wallet too if you'd like to try blue land you can get started and get 15 off your first order at blue land.com slash fruity that is blue land.com slash fruity Thank you as always to Blue Land and now let's get back to the show.

Bilmar's next big belief that I gathered after watching a lot of episodes of Real Time with Bilma

is this idea that we need to break out of our echo chambers.

This is one that is...

Why are you laughing?

Because he's such a fucking liar.

I know, I know.

Why are you lying?

Okay, let me address the listener.

I believe in talking to all different sorts of people.

Part of my job is to try to engage people who disagree with me.

That's actually a big part of my job.

And I try to do so meaningfully.

It's hard to argue against people like Bill Maher, who, or even like, you know, like these big YouTube content farms like Jubilee, which I talk about all the time, whose whole thing is like, we need to get out of our echo chambers.

We have to talk about that critically, though, in these contexts, because what does it mean for Bill Maher to get out of his echo chamber?

And how does he go go about doing that?

Well, let's look.

In recent years, I would say, I would say the two biggest gripes that Bill Maher has with what he calls the left is that they are too hung up, A, on campus activism for Palestine, and B, trans people.

I mean,

people say to me all the time, you make fun of the left more than you used to.

Yeah, because they're dumber than they used to be.

And the right has gotten dumber too.

You know, if I had to find a reason why I thought I was right about doing this, it happened after October 7th.

I mean people demonstrating for Hamas,

for Hamas?

It's like rooting for the planes on 9-11.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, and it's a joke about that.

For fuck's sake, I mean...

You might want to tell it to the college kids these days, because these morons are out there protesting for Hamas.

Protesting for this terrorist organization?

Hamas?

That's just crazy to me.

I mean, it's like if they were around on 9-11, they'd be rooting for the planes.

Yeah.

For Hamas?

It's like rooting for the planes on 9-11.

I say that's like rooting for the planes on 9-11.

I know you.

I knew you'd agree with it if you're just game in a minute.

I know it's kind of shocking at first.

I'm going to read you.

A list of right-wing media personalities that Bill Maher has had on his podcast, Club Random, over the last couple years.

Here we go: Piers Morgan, Dave Rubin, Kid Rock, Greg Gutfeld, Russell Brand, Dr.

Phil, RFK Jr., Jordan Peterson, Riley Gaines, Vivek Ramaswamy, Candice Owens, Roseanne Barr, Jillian Michaels, Whitney Cummings, Dana White, Jerry Seinfeld, not technically a Republican, but an extremely vocal and moneyed Zionist, Ben Shapiro, Matt Geach, Charlie Kirk, Tony Hinchcliffe, Tim Poole.

Bill Maher has had zero transgender guests on Club Random.

In fact, in the 20 plus years of real time with Bill Maher,

do you know how many guests, how many trans guests Bill Maher has had?

Yes, because I have the outline open.

Oh, fuck.

I didn't look at it, but I want to say,

I want to say none.

One.

One.

One.

Give him a little credit.

He had an interview with Janet Mock

in 2015.

There we go.

Similarly, when it comes to the pro-Palestine movement, pro-Palestinian student activists, he has had zero Palestinian guests on his podcast.

He has had zero pro-Palestine student activists on his podcast, despite having oh, so much to say about them.

Do you know how many Palestinian guests he has had in the 20 years of doing real time?

Now I looked ahead, Will.

I also have the outline open.

I would have fucked you guys.

One.

The answer is one.

The answer is one.

He had Rula Jabreal

in 2015.

He has not had any Palestinians on any of his platforms since the 2023 genocide began.

And I just think it's really interesting that the guy who's so frequently telling us to get out of our echo chambers, it's like he imagines himself as the furthest left someone can be.

And then he only talks to right wingers.

And that's his version of getting out of his echo chamber, even though the majority of the time he spends speaking with these right-wingers is spent agreeing with them.

He likes to find common ground is a big thing.

Like, his podcast is a great way to like launder your reputation.

Because, like, you mentioned Matt Gates.

The Matt Gates episode is insane.

If you watch that episode, you'd be like, what a normal guy.

That's one of the weirdest guys alive, Matt Gates.

He is a pedophile.

So, obviously, the other thing with Bill Maher, is he loves to have men on who have sexual misconduct allegations against them, and then he loves to hand them, wave them away.

So with Matt Gates, he was like, if you were actually guilty, you'd be in jail right now.

It's like, oh yeah, powerful people famously always go to jail for that kind of thing.

And he also doesn't know things.

So he has Terrence Howard on, who is essentially, who believes he's invented a new math.

Terrence Howard comes on and he's like, I never hit my wife.

And it's like, well, Terrence Howard admitted in court that he hit one of his partners.

He goes, oh, you know, one of them filed a restraining order against me and got it, even though there was no evidence that I'd ever been physical with her.

She showed up to court with a black eye that she said he gave her.

Army hammer he had on.

My, my thing is, I swear, if Harvey Weinstein gets out of jail, he will be on Club Random two weeks later and Bill Maher will be like, I believe something happened in the hotel room, but like, I also believe women believe in like getting justice for not getting work however they can.

Look, I'm not here to like defame and I'm, I'm, I will say allegedly.

I know what you're going to talk about.

You know, Bill Maher has skeletons in his closet.

You know, just based on his public behavior with women, like, you know, there's shit that we don't know.

You know, the Me Too movement missed him, like, that bullet missed Trump.

Like,

it like just, he is still afraid.

Like, I think there are people who are just still afraid that, like, oh, man, I will get called out for the, for the times that I've been non-consensual or like something that happened.

And there's a bigger conversation here, but I do think that

Bill Maher taps into a fear.

He taps into a fear that men have that I think even during the Me Too movement, even men who were like good, good men had, which is like, where does this stop?

Where does this end?

Did I do something bad?

What's going to happen to me?

You can get canceled just like that off an allegation, even though that actually wasn't happening and didn't happen.

But the same thing with like the trans ideology.

Well, where does it stop?

Well, I I don't know.

Isn't this all too sudden?

Isn't this too much?

And he appeals to that, like, just this reactionary part of people that want to quell social movements and their demands out of fear that maybe they will have to be held accountable for their behavior and/or have a little bit of empathy and understanding of people who are not them.

Yes, 100%.

And bringing it back to this like echo chamber thing, I mean, so much of I think Bill Maher's politics are driven by a lack of curiosity about anything he doesn't already know.

Like you said earlier, I mean, he can never, he can not only never be wrong about anything, but he can't like learn anything new.

Yes, yes.

He, he can only regress further into conservatism and like the comfort of I'm already right about everything.

And anyone who thinks something new, anyone who, who identifies in a way that I don't understand,

anyone who's transgender, it's like they, they just must be wrong because they're outside the scope of what makes me feel comfortable.

And with this echo chamber thing too, I mean, people, people like in my extended family will talk about Bill Maher the way that they talk about Joe Rogan, which by the way, I think Bill Maher is very upset that he didn't sort of become Joe Rogan.

And I think his, I think his like shitty club random podcast is his failed attempt at becoming Joe Rogan.

Oh, he was on, he's been on Rogan three times, and his like jealousy is like very apparent.

It's like seven hours of video I've watched of the two of them talking.

It's the worst thing I've ever been through.

I'm so sorry.

It's like getting dumped by your high school girlfriend.

You can't imagine the pain of it.

How do you come down from that?

Will, like, after you watch that, like two of the worst people having the worst conversation possible.

I already had

brain worms.

It's whatever.

It's like, it's like, you know, it's like when somebody gets stage four lung cancer and they're like, what am I going to quit smoking?

Like, you know, I feel like I'm just in that place now.

Perfect.

People I know, like, they'll talk about Bill Maher and Joe Rogan in the same way.

And they'll say this thing always, which is, they'll talk to anybody.

When has Joe Rogan had a trans person on?

When has Joe Rogan had a Palestinian or a pro-Palestinian student activist on?

They talk about these things endlessly.

Or a prison abolitionist.

Talk to somebody.

Talk to the people.

And the other thing about it is that it's good TV.

You cannot make the argument that putting people on your show to vocally make a case for abolishing prisons or for freeing Palestine or for

allowing people to live.

in the bodies they want to live in, that that's not good TV.

And you got a booker, you've got access to the best, you know, folks.

You can fly people out.

You could get someone to make a good case, but you're afraid of someone making a good case.

It's why Fox News will occasionally have someone on that they've prepped to be like, you know, this is a feminist.

And she's

aborting live on television.

And they're like, they're good at caricature.

They're good caricature because they know it's safe, because it's much better as a boogeyman in your head than you're too afraid to expose your audience to.

these ideas.

But friend, I mean, they also won't have these conversations because those are people whose political positions actually challenge power.

Yes.

And, you know, we're talking at the beginning about, well, why does Bill Maher continue to have this career when he's not funny?

He doesn't have coherent politics.

The politics that he insists are right and that would allow the Democratic Party to win, for example, ignoring trans people and ignoring Palestine, are the politics that the Democratic Party has abided by in the last several election cycles and it is losing catastrophically.

Fuck that.

They can't even defend abortion rights.

I mean, you know what I'm saying?

He is

bad at everything he claims to be a voice for, and yet he still has this career.

Well, that's because he sucks up to power.

Just like Barry Weiss, who was just put in as the head of CBS News, these are people who fundamentally, at the end of the day, will not challenge power.

They will not challenge the head of HBO, the head of Paramount.

And that's why they keep their careers.

And in the case of Bill Maher, he has a legacy audience who will tune into any slop he feeds them.

And that's why he's not going to have those guests on that actually challenge power.

And he is going to continue to pretend that having an amicable conversation with Riley Gaines, wherein he makes fun of Leah Thomas's genitals for an hour, is what it means to get outside of your echo chamber.

It really is important to understand that it's not just Bill Maher.

There's so many centrists who do the exact same thing.

I mean, I've been on Piers Morgan's show many times.

They don't have me on anymore because I've asked to be paid and I also destroyed their last panel.

But,

you know, Piers Morgan consistently compares himself openly to Bill Maher.

I'm like Bill Maher.

I believe in gay marriage,

but you've got to answer for the trans people first.

And he's obsessed with trans women in sports.

And I think this is very much deliberate.

And so it is the disservice and to Will's goal of obliterating the career of this man.

It is true because he takes up not just comedic space, but also political space as seemingly liberal, seemingly on the left, and seemingly having these discussions when in fact it's just two very well-off, privileged people agreeing with one another.

The next big Bill Maher belief that I have here and that I was actually just starting to get to was what he thinks the Democrats need to do to win forever, as he says, which is abandon wokeism,

which is, I just wrote C, trans trans people.

Bill Maher is very much an advocate for the very pervasive idea within the Democratic Party that throwing trans people or Palestinians or really any variable minority under the bus is a viable solution to winning.

Just a few months ago, he outlined his plan for healing the political divide in America in a segment which he called Let's Make a Deal and which I called the Centrist Manifesto.

It's kind of late in the the fourth quarter for America and we're behind by three touchdowns.

Let's make one last stab at a grand bargain between the two sides that hate each other so much.

You stop saying fetuses are the same as babies and we'll stop saying trans women are the same as biological women.

You stop saying alternative facts and we'll stop saying my truth.

You stop saying thoughts and prayers and we'll stop with the land acknowledgement.

And there's a lot of stuff like that on the left.

And when conservatives see it, they say, I'm sorry, we're just not going to go along with reinventing society, often pointlessly, even if we have to cancel democracy to do it.

That's what they're saying.

They see gender is only a construct and sex is assigned at birth, and they say, we're not doing that.

Transing kids by self-diagnosis with no age limit, no parental notification, and no acknowledgement of social contagion, not doing it.

Asylum now covers any reason for anyone to come to America, not doing it.

Homelessness is a lifestyle.

Natural immunity doesn't count anymore.

Whiteness is toxic.

We're not doing it.

It was essentially like a regurgitation of all of these falsehoods, misinformation, if not total disinformation about trans kids.

And it was essentially saying, you know, we'll throw away trans kids.

Again, he keeps saying like, we'll stop doing this as if he's a representative of the left.

We'll throw away trans kids as long as you stop doing authoritarianism.

That's called the Kamala Harris campaign, babe.

Like, exactly.

Also, it's like, well, why don't we just keep doing authoritarianism and then we'll just throw trans people away ourselves?

Like, exactly.

Why do we even need to make that deal?

We're going to negotiate with the authoritarian.

Stop beating me up and I'll give you $5.

Like, I could just beat the shit out of you and then take your whole wallet.

Like, I don't need to, I don't need to honor your pathetic.

That's the thing, too.

is pathetic, this kind of pathetic bargaining.

It's like,

who are you to make these negotiations?

And also, like, why would they take, like, why?

Why would they take that deal?

They're winning, man.

This reminds me actually a lot when I was watching it of the conversation that Ezra Klein just had with Tanahazi Coates,

which they talk about, like, what are our roles as journalists, as writers, as podcasters, as political strategists?

You know, like, which of those lanes do you choose to occupy?

And it's very clear over and over again that Bill Maher thinks of himself as an entertainer on television, but also as like a de facto political strategist for the Democratic Party.

And he's saying, here are the minorities that we should throw under the bus in the next campaign that will guarantee our win for the rest of time.

I also happen to, you know, of course, personally don't care at all about those minorities.

So I'm not throwing them away as a compromise.

I'm throwing them away because I don't care about trans people.

To be clear, that's me speaking as Bill Maher.

And it's interesting to me, though, because Ezra Klein makes a similar argument where he's like, we should run pro-life Democrats in red states and we should basically throw women in red states under the bus.

And that's his strategic calculation of how Democrats should win.

And the thing is, though, those sacrifices of minorities,

even if you're saying I'm a political strategist and that's my strategy, that is what Democrats have been doing.

And it has lost us every single election.

It drives me crazy.

It is a losing one.

You are absolutely what we were saying before.

Why would people want Diet Coke?

They can have the real thing.

Why do people want Diet Republicans?

They can have the real thing.

And also, the most important piece in the last 20 years, and I think Trump has really proved this, and I think Bernie Sanders has proven it.

I think AOC proves this, is someone who's genuine and authentic and believes in something.

So when you soft pedal your morals or you throw some of your base to the wolves, people can see that.

And they're like, oh, you're a pushover.

How are you going to fight for me?

You say you're going to throw all of these other people under the bus.

Well, I don't know.

I'm a union member.

How do I know you're not going to throw union members under the bus in the future?

I don't because you've sold so many other people down the river.

These people are deeply lost because they're stuck in a hot box of their own fucking pseudo-intellectual farts.

And Ezra Klein is there.

Stephen A.

Smith is another one.

And I will just add because I worked with them for many, many years, but TYT and Jank Uger at the Young Turks is another one.

He is someone who will consistently, and he did this when Charlie Kirk was alive, goes into spaces with right wingers and tells them that the left has lost their minds and that he agrees with them that the left has lost their minds and they're too extreme and all we need to do is come together.

And he was doing an entire tour before Trump took office about a year ago after he won doing this exact same thing.

I mean, he's even, Jank Uger has done this to me personally, going on Jillian Michael's show and saying that I stood with trans athletes too much to a point on a Piers Morgan appearance and that that made me look crazy and it made me look stupid.

The point is, is that there are a lot of people who do this and they purport themselves to be progressive and liberals and they get on shows, they get platforms precisely because to Matt your point, they will not take on the powerful.

and they will break bread with the right in this grand collusion to really like kill people.

I mean, we're not, this is, these are people's fucking lives.

Like you can't play with trans kids.

They are being, they're dying.

They're being killed, right?

Like it is dangerous what is happening.

And there are way too many central motherfuckers who want to play games like this.

And they're all very successful.

It's also like,

like they talk about, oh, I'm reasonable.

I want to exist in reality.

And then you go, okay, well, the reality is, is that when like pre-pubescent kids, there's essentially no difference in athletic performance.

No, there is no difference.

And then after puberty, it's like, well, if like high school sports, it's like, well, most kids play high school sports for something to do.

Like it's this thing too, this idea of like everybody's trying to, what, make the WNBA.

It's like, no, most people just want something to do.

They just want to play this game with their friends.

It's how they find community.

And then once you get into high-level sports, it's like none of these people will have the conversation of like, look at Leah Thomas's numbers the season season before she started transitioning, the season where she was still swimming with men, where she had started transitioning, and then the season after when she was swimming with women.

Like you can see the effects of what transitioning did to her performance.

They can't ever have this conversation.

And the other thing they're wrong about, in 2022 was the year the Republicans went all in on running on anti-trans.

And that was the year when Democrats were actually like defending trans people publicly.

And the Republicans lost that election.

They only won Congress because the New York Democratic Party could not be worse at their job.

So, like, you could just point to previous elections and go, well, what about this?

But they won't.

And they won't ever have anyone on who challenges them.

If that show has researchers, I mean, I'd be in a mental hospital if I was, like, I'd have to be in a psych ward if I was a researcher on real time.

Cause I'd be like, do, am I real?

Am I a ghost?

Am I actually giving him these notes?

Or am I, do I, do I live in an alternative reality where I'm actually in a box right now and I'm imagining all of this?

I will say, though, I think that like you're even giving the transports gripe too much credit because for Bill Maher, just like for all of these self-identifying, authentically conservatives, it never is actually about transports, which is an issue that every single American knows, if not deep down, that

just does not affect them in daily life, doesn't affect them in any life, not a widespread issue at all.

Bill Maher also goes on to talk about, well, it's actually about being able to access gender-affirming care and to be able to transition.

And just like all of those right-wingers, he will go on and on about, we're transing the three-year-olds and we've got a compromise.

We can't keep transing the three-year-olds.

He is never held to account about what he means when he says things like that, which obviously, like, what does he mean when he says things like that?

Because, like, the way that you think about it is like, oh, we're, you know, he loves, they always use the most dramatic language.

We're chopping up three-year-olds.

That's not happening.

He'll question the science of trans medicine and then he'll go,

it's a social contagion.

And you go, well, trans medicine has a basis behind it.

Social contagions aren't real.

That's not a accredited theory.

That's like not something actual like social scientists believe in.

But just like you said,

he lies.

He just lies constantly.

He said recently with one of the Pod Save America guys, Democrats will lose every election without shift on trans issues.

I agree, actually.

I also agree.

I think they should shift in the other direction, though, where they should actually stand up for trans people, which is actually a great point that I want to clarify here, because I was reading Bill Maher's Reddit, which is full of, or a subreddit, which is full of Bill Maher's fans, which is a really interesting group of people that actually are turning.

They're turning on him.

Oh, they are.

Rapidly.

Yes.

Yeah.

Every club random, they're like, Tim Poole, another, can we just get Brian Cranston again?

Like, they're so mad at his guests he's been booking.

But like, like I read this one comment that was upvoted a bit and it was like, Bill Maher's not anti-trans.

He's just, quote, he's critical of the extent to which Democrats have made this a central issue.

Dear listener, I need you to know.

I need you to know that no matter what you've heard from Fox News or Bill Maher or anyone else, Democrats, just like Francesca said, have sold trans people down the river.

Democrats, look at Kamala Harris's campaign.

The one time Kamala Harris spoke about trans people was when she was asked about will she protect gender-affirming care in an interview.

And she said she would leave it up to the states.

That is the extent to which Kamala Harris made trans kids and trans people broadly a part of her campaign messaging.

Democrats have done the opposite of make this a central issue, which I think in the face of the amount of discrimination that trans people are facing is a bad thing.

I think they should stand up for trans kids, but Bill Maher doesn't think that like Bill Maher treats Democrats throwing trans kids under the bus as a compromise.

For Bill Maher, it's not a compromise because Bill Maher authentically does not care about trans people.

Exactly.

All of this just reminds me a lot of like when I talk to centrists who speak on behalf of progressives and say, like, this is what we have to do if we progressives want to win.

We all want the same thing.

We just disagree on how to get there.

And I'm like, well, Bill, I don't know if we want the same thing.

I definitely don't.

I don't want your clinky glasses in your creepy little basement and all the, you know, the pedophiles that you have on your show.

I definitely don't want the same world that Bill Maher wants.

But I think that's exactly this like bad strategy is really important to understand because I think Bill Maher plays a role that a lot of centrists like to play.

And I would, I even include, you know, I mentioned Jank.

I think there are many others.

I think Ezra Klein does this too, which is, I'm going to interpret politics for you,

broader audience and broader liberals, by actually representing the arguments of the right.

You know, it's the right that has made trans athletes an issue.

It's not the left.

But when you have figures like Marr and others and other centrists, like basically taking hook line and sinker the you know issues that the right has claimed the left only cares about, that is when it becomes a problem because then you're looking to someone like Ezra Klein for your sort of political bellwether, and he's telling you, you've made abortion too much of an issue, ergo, walk away from it, and it's scaring the red state.

And he's supposed to be your sort of like, again, your political analyst.

And so then you say it's okay to walk away from these issues.

And we don't have to imagine.

Obviously, it's happening to trans people, but it's happening to immigrants right now.

What happens when an entire political party walks away from the immigrant community in the United States?

We're seeing it.

They get rounded up by ICE.

People are being disappeared.

Kamala Harris could not be bothered to go visit Springfields with the Haitian immigrants who are being demonized as they're eating their cats or eating the dogs.

It's not funny.

It was funny for like a moment.

And then there's like neo-Nazis in the streets.

People are fearing for their lives.

And it's like, yeah, man, when you sleep on immigrant rights, when you sleep on a real pathway to citizenship, when you sleep on amnesty for fucking 30 years, this, you get rolled.

And so, like, okay, is it okay to sell out moms and dads who are hardworking immigrant workers?

Is that cool for you?

Because that's what's happening now.

Are we going to win now?

Are we going to win now?

I mean, if you ask Schumer, we will win now because all we need to do is let it get really, really bad, do nothing, and people are going to vote Democrat.

That was such a great tangent.

And to that end, too, they're like, well, if we just abandon trans people, if we just abandon immigrants, remember, Kamala promised to be harder on the border than Trump.

If we just sell out Palestinians, if we just sell out whoever the hell is next, we can win.

And I'm like, well, also,

what are we winning?

Yeah, what's left?

They're like, well, we just have to abandon everyone to get power.

And I'm like, well, what's the point of,

I don't, I don't care.

And embrace the billionaires.

Are you going to get to the Zoron part?

Because I cannot wait.

Yes.

Yes.

Zoron, who, Zoron Momdani, Mamdani, if you, this is a reel if you're living under a rock, but I always like to make sure everyone listening is on the same page, is the frontrunner for mayor right now here in New York City.

He defeated Andrew Cuomo in the primary.

Andrew Cuomo is humiliating himself by running again.

And now they are rematching on November 4th.

Can't wait.

Get out to vote if you live in New York City.

But Zoran Mamdani is a self-identified democratic socialist.

He is pro-Palestine.

He is vocally pro-trans, among all sorts of other things.

And he is galvanizing people globally, beyond New York City, beyond New York, beyond the United States, globally, the amount of people in my messages saying, oh, I'm from like the Netherlands and we're getting, you know, TV segments about Zoran.

And he is, you know, running as a Democrat and galvanizing people in a way that no Democrat has been able to since AOC kind of and before that, Bernie.

And what did Bill Maher say about Zoran?

Bill Maher said that he is, quote, a walking advertisement for the Republican Party.

Do you think the mayor, that one person, if he is a Democratic socialist, do you think that he would have the power and influence to be able to like usher in socialism?

Definitely has the power and influence to elect J.D.

Vance or whoever is the Republican candidate next time.

It is a walking commercial for the Republican Party.

And it's just so funny to me that Bill Maher thinks that because it's like he's an advertisement for the Republican Party to you,

specifically, Bill Maher,

because Zoron is an actual progressive who believes in progressive ideals that you don't believe in.

And he's winning.

He's winning.

You're just becoming a Republican.

That's it.

If you've been following any Democratic consultants,

apparently winning is actually bad now, that Zoron winning is bad.

And

we like to win, but not like this.

And this is what I mean about taking up this space, this sort of like intellectual space to interpret how the other side sees your movement.

And so, like, to an untrained, you know, viewer of Bill Maher or whatever, they don't know anything about Zoron, but they say that he's a perfect advertisement for the Republicans.

That scares liberals.

That's designed to scare you to walk away from somebody who is quite literally single-handedly been the only bright spot in the year 2025.

Like, I don't care if your kid was born this fucking year, it's been grim.

All right.

It's Zoron Mamdani.

That's the only, the only thing that has been positive.

And it's like, oh no, we cannot vote our hopes.

We must always vote our fears because our hopes will eventually lose.

That's why we've got to go with the winner, Hillary Clinton, and the winner, Kamala Harris, and all these winners, because we have to, we can't have anyone like Bernie Sanders or Zoran Mamdani or AOZ.

I think it was like an episode of Chapo years ago where they were talking about there was some interview with a Democratic consultant who was like, you know, we're like nervous to put out these big policy plans because then the Republicans can attack them.

And one of the hosts of the show just like lost it was like, well,

hey, you know what?

You should not even run anybody because then you really can't lose.

Like if you just don't run a candidate, then you don't have a candidate they can attack.

And you're guaranteed to not give them the opportunity to attack you.

You hear this stuff and it's like, why would anyone vote for this party?

Who sits around being like, I just want to vote for the biggest loser I can think of?

This is America.

We don't like stuff like being like, we're afraid of getting attacked, but don't run a harsh primary because then if you draw blood, then the Republicans have, it's like.

If you're so pathetic that you can't win if someone runs against you, why would I I ever walk around my neighborhood knocking on doors being like, hey, vote for this person.

They're the most fragile human being you've ever met in your life.

They will walk away from anything they believe in.

Trust me.

I want to take the Bill Lamar model, but do it in the other direction where I frame myself as the most conservative you can be.

Oh, I love that.

And then I get like a big time show and I'm like, let's bridge the divide.

And then I like only talk to like communists.

And I'm going to pretend that like that's the entire political spectrum and like reorient American politics.

First of all, unironically, Matt, I want that show and that show would crush.

Ezra Klein should be the conservative edge of that show.

Like Bill Maher should be that fine.

We'll have Bill Maher on and that would be so beautiful to watch.

Yeah, but that show is not getting funded by HBO.

I'll tell you that much.

No, it's not.

And that's why it doesn't exist.

I am going to change my camera battery real quick and pee.

I have to pee really bad.

I'm just going to get up because I feel like a loser sitting here alone.

I want to give a quick shout out to our friends over at Incogni for sponsoring this episode of the show.

I have mentioned on this podcast before how I have been scammed or almost scammed, getting better, I am getting better by people online who attained my personal information and then attempted or successfully to wield it against me.

I've talked about the Christian Health Share Ministry that targeted me while I was looking to buy health insurance over the New York State marketplace.

An experience that, wow, even without getting scammed is already

just a joy.

I love America.

Or like, do you ever get notified that your private information or passwords were included in a data leak?

Passwords, credit card information, shopping habits, stuff that as users of the internet, we can't really help from putting out there, but what we can do is take it back off of the market and out of the hands of parasitic data brokers.

Incogni is a fabulous service that helps you take your data off the market and out of the hands of data brokers by individually and personally requesting to each of those brokers to yank your information off the internet, which is something that you legally have the ability to do, but that actually manually going in and doing would take a really, really long time.

And with Incogni's custom removals feature, which is included in their unlimited plan and their family unlimited plan, you can just point to any people search site or other websites where your personal information is visible.

And one of Incogni's private agents will take care of it for you.

If you want to get your personal information out of the hands of data brokers and avoid the scams and the data leaks,

you can check out Incogni and get 60% off in annual plan at incogni.com/slash fruity.

That is incogni.com/slash fruity.

And now, let's get back to it.

All right.

The last big Bill Maher belief that he repeats ad nauseum is: I haven't changed, the left has.

When people say, you know, you never used to make fun of the left as much because they didn't give me the material.

And now they're so ridiculous on so many things that as a comedian, of course, I'm going to go where the material is.

And you wonder why the left catches more jokes from me?

They changed, not me.

Okay?

I mean, they left me.

I didn't leave them.

I mean, I'm the same.

That's what I'm always saying.

The

left went to places that we all know are goofy.

It's not me who changed.

Yes.

I feel I'm the same guy.

Instead of locking up the toothpaste, how about we lock up the shoplifter?

You know.

This is not.

He's a Bill, you're a Republican.

That doesn't make me Republican, you assholes.

I mean, that is probably

my biggest beef with the left.

And you know, I do not couch my criticisms of them.

And that's why I have such a hard time out here, because there's such purists out here, and they will not countenance any diversion from the one true opinion as they see it.

So I am insufficiently liberal for them.

So many people these days are like, Bill, why are you so hard on the left these days?

I'm like, I'm just as hard on the right.

It's just that the left didn't used to do these things that make me go,

fuck off.

The far left thinks I am.

I put out a book and a stand-up special in the last six months, both to make the point and in great detail.

You've changed, not me.

Trust me, the liberals have a lot to answer for.

And I call them out on all of it, which, again, is why they don't like me.

And I don't give a fuck.

You talk about it.

You know what?

I wonder if you give a fuck because you talk about it a lot.

I do.

You advertise how much it affects you by talking about it.

In every single clip that I watched of Bill Maher and getting ready to film this episode, I was like, this is the one that had me like jaw on the floor.

I was like, why,

why am I enjoying watching Bill Maher get dogwalked by

pedophile Matt Gates,

who's wearing like that like thin pullover white, like guys who wear like hoodies, but they're made of like t-shirt material and it's long sleeve and it doesn't look like he's a shirt on underneath.

And then like capri like cords or something that are way too, he looks, he looks nuts in the episode.

It's really a race to the bottom with

this episode in general.

But Will, you actually were the one who created a number of the collages of Bill Maher in this episode.

And also you've just chronicled so much of this man.

And so when it comes to the like, I've i've not changed the left has i want to first defer to you he's definitely changed he bill maher has changed a lot because there is a period of time he used to care about things like mass incarceration like this is the way he could be a bridge because you know it's like if somebody's from the heritage foundation they're the scum of the earth if somebody is from the cato institute they're broad they're probably bad until you start talking about like decriminalization and like jail And then the Cato Institute is actually a valuable ally of people on the left.

I've seen labor activists talk about like labor activism has to be a broad tent because there are, you work with people that you would disagree with on a lot, but the thing you probably agree with each other about is that you should work less and be paid more for it.

So like those people are your natural allies in that space.

So Bill Maher could have on libertarians, like he would have on Boots Riley on politically incorrect.

And Boots Riley would be like a communist.

And Bill Maher would, you know, go at him for being a communist, but he would have communists on his show.

He shortened the spectrum ideologically of people he'd have on much more on the left than the right.

But he could be a bridge and have people on who would fight about everything else they talked about, but then he would bring up, you know, there are too many people in prison on stupid, trumped-up drug charges.

And he would have people who previously had been screaming at each other go, 100%, I agree.

And that is an example of a valuable conversation that could happen.

If you just looked at the right-wing people Adam Friedland had on his show, you'd be like, this is the most right-wing man in the world.

But he has on weirdos, politicians, like he genuinely has a broad spectrum of people on.

Bill Maher really is locked in.

There is the center and then the right.

And because of that, he never ever has a real conversation.

Josh Rogan was on, I think, from the Post, and Rogan, Josh Rogan just pushed back on the Trump dinner.

And Bill Maher like had a hissy fit over it.

The Trump dinner being that we didn't even get to this, but

there's so much.

In line with all sorts of other things Bill Maher has been up to lately, he recently got dinner with Trump and then made a segment of real time about it where he was basically like, hey, for everything people say about Trump, he was nice to me and he listened.

Just for starters, he laughs.

I'd never seen him laugh in public.

I've had so many conversations with prominent people who are much less connected.

People who don't look you in the eye.

People who don't really listen because they just want to get to their next thing.

People whose response to things you say just doesn't track like, what?

None of that with him.

And he mostly steered the conversation to, what do you think about this?

He's a great host.

And I'm like, well, why do you think he was so nice to you, Bill Maher?

Because Bill Maher is like, I printed up a list of insults he said about me and had him sign them.

First good sign, before I left for the Capitol, I had my staff collect and print out

this list of almost 60 different insulting epithets that the president had said about me.

Things like stupid, dummy, low-life dummy, sleazebag, sick, sad, stone-cold, crazy.

Really a dumb guy, fired like a dog, his show is dead.

I brought this to the White House because I wanted him to sign it.

Which he did.

And he said that, like, he's like, can you believe Trump was such a good sport?

He did that.

And it's like, wait, if somebody came to my house and was like, here's a list of all the times you owned me publicly.

Will you sign it?

I'd be like, yeah, of course.

Because that's the most pathetic thing I could imagine being like, will you sign this list of insults, master?

Like,

and he thinks what he did was cool.

He can't handle criticism.

He can't be disagreed with.

His crowd, if his crowd doesn't laugh at one of his jokes, there are multiple clips of him this season literally sticking his tongue out like a child at his own live audience because they're not laughing at one of his jokes.

They barked in off the Santa Monica pier, by the way.

That's not true anymore.

It is very difficult to get tickets to real time because the audience is very small because he doesn't want a crowd that will disagree with he's talked about.

He's like, my crowd is great now.

They never disagree with me.

Like, that's, he's become a shell of himself.

And what he used to be fully formed was, it's like, it's like, oh, that huge pile of dog shit is a shell of what it used to be.

So it's like starting bad and just getting worse.

But it's the kind of change nobody ever recognizes.

Nobody's ever like, I've changed, but like, I'm way, way worse than I used to be.

Like people only go like, I've changed.

I'm a better person now.

They never go like, I've changed.

I drink three bottles of jack instead of two every night.

I mean, and he has changed and not for the good.

I mean, I would say that, you know, if you're being generous, you could say he just has not been open-minded to new information, new people, and new perspectives.

That's being very generous.

But I think you're right, Will, that actually he has changed.

He has become more narrow-minded.

He has become more conservative.

Whether that's a product of him understanding trans people exist and also want human rights and healthcare, or just the fact that he is ultimately a conservative.

I think he's a testament to the fact that the old democratic liberalism is dying.

That not looking at the wealth inequality.

like that's for the birds that not talking about palestinians look at the way that newsom and butijij and um and booker have proven themselves to be total duds when it comes to answering simple questions about netanyahu and and and palestinian human rights like we are done with them we are turning the page on them so he is clawing it relevance and he's got to go go to the right to get his bread buttered somewhere.

What a thing to say that like, you've not changed.

My God, if in 20 years I defend my career by saying I've not changed, fucking put me out of my misery, kill me.

He's abandoned having beliefs too.

Like he doesn't have a core.

He doesn't have any ideology anymore.

It's like, and he's also a coward.

We were talking about all the trans stuff.

I forgot to say he will say, I believe it is inherent.

I believe trans people are real and there is something inherent.

But then he'll be like, the Democrats have to stop saying crazy things like a man can be pregnant.

And it's like, well, if a man can't be pregnant, then you fundamentally do not believe in the reality of trans people.

But he's can't accept where he's at as a person.

So he says the thing you would say if you believed a thing, like the intro line to believing it, and then everything else he says about it is, are the words of a man who does not believe in the thing.

Yeah, I just made an episode about Deborah Messing, and a lot of this reminds me of her, where people will spew the most bigoted, vile, right-wing, reactionary, conservative beliefs, but still find sort of a mixed up way to like identify as fundamentally progressive.

Because in the case of Bill Maher and the case of Deborah Messing, they don't like what it says about them if they abandon the label of like liberal.

And I think also, you know, these are people who live in Hollywood and it means something to be liberal socially or to or to pretend to be to be liberal or progressive or humanist.

I also think when it comes to like, I've not changed, he'll say things like, nobody was talking about this gender stuff five years ago.

Well, I'm like, as a gay man, I think about how there was a certain point in the 2000s where you could make the exact same argument about gay marriage.

And it's not that five years prior to that, gay people didn't exist and gay people didn't want to get married.

It was just that it wasn't a mainstream conversation, especially among people as privileged as Bill Maher, privileged enough not to think about those things.

And so I just think it is such a ridiculous argument to say, well, well, I've not changed, they have.

Well, it's like, yeah, but it's good that these conversations have come to the forefront.

And like, it's such a hallmark of

like a straight, white, rich guy.

Totally.

To be like, I'm hearing this for the first time.

It has never existed before.

Yeah.

You know, fuck you.

Sorry.

Yeah.

Sorry.

This also happens with celebrity a lot.

You know, there is a certain point where when like a comedian's only bit or only jokes are about the food at room service in the hotel they're staying in, you realize they're like a little bit too insular.

Like there's a little bit, like maybe they need to live a little or, you know, walk a different way to work or actually walk to work or drive themselves, whatever it is.

But like he is a celebrity.

He is wealthy.

And everything that he's also experiencing is the experience of, you know, you see comedians like Chappelle becoming more insular and more disconnected and speaking to fewer and fewer people.

It is a product of money that, yeah, you've changed.

You can only relate to people who are as privileged and as removed from real problems as you are.

So

like, this is, that's the other, that's the other thing to note here.

Like you're fucking out of touch.

The last question I wrote here, which I think I've kind of answered in my own way, is like, why not just be a conservative?

Which like Bilma is conservative, but he's still resisting the label.

He's still speaking for like the American left, which he's so, I think, obviously not a part of.

He's too proud.

It is.

strictly pride.

And not a pride in like, I'm too good for that, but pride in the fact that he's always said he's a liberal.

And this whole time he's been like, I haven't changed, they have.

By saying he's a conservative, he would be admitting he's wrong.

And he can't do that.

I think it is that simple.

He just is too stubborn to admit what everyone around him can see.

Also, I think he lives in Brentwood, but I'm not 100%.

Oh, thank God you corrected me on the Los Angeles

geography.

He is not a conservative because it's a lane.

It's a much more lucrative and interesting lane to pretend to be a liberal, pretend to represent the left, and then agree with the right than it is to just be another right-wing influencer.

It's the why I left the left juzh.

It's that the clicks.

Like, when you leave the left, because they were so mean to me in blankety blank way, people want to like, they rush over.

We don't have enough why I left the right.

But again, it's this like the fallacy of the intolerant left, the fallacy of they went too far.

Meanwhile, we are truly living in authoritarianism.

People are having their visas revoked.

The FBI is visiting activists right now.

Our doxing people are, I mean, not doxing, they're going to their homes because they're the fucking FBI.

Like you have to suspend so much disbelief.

You have to live in like, again, complete separate reality.

And I do think Bill Maher does that.

And he helps, just like so many Democrats, I think he helps a lot of other people live there too.

Which actually gets at the very last, I promise, the actual last question I have on here, which is, and I think I might make this the title of the episode, but we'll see.

What is the point of Bill Maher?

To me, and bringing it right back to the top, the way I've observed this in my own sort of like centrist liberal identifying extended family is that he gives people who maybe don't like the style in which Trump is a conservative, or they don't like the style of, like, I think so much of it comes down to like how Republicans express themselves.

I think he gives permission for like Democrats and liberals in the U.S.

who don't identify with that vision of conservatism to hold the same beliefs while still thinking of themselves as like

sophisticated coastal people.

He exists to put political debate in very narrow terms to keep power safe, to pretend like we're living in a free speech democracy, to pretend like we're having honest conversations when we actually are not, and to never, ever, ever touch the powerful, whether they be in media, whether they be in politics.

He is a perfect foil if you're going to actually not live in a democracy that pretends to be one.

I think he is a devil from hell sent to kill me specifically.

And he hasn't done it yet.

Keep fighting, Will.

I think that is ultimately the point of him.

Francesca and Will, thank you so much for joining me

and talking about this.

Ugh, I've been, this has been like gnawing at me.

And I feel like I can now relinquish myself.

of Bill Maher.

But you know who can't?

Will Weldon.

Thanks for coming to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I'm like I'm the Christ of Bill Maher, where it's like, I take your Bill Maher unto me and you are now free.

Will, where can people find more of you?

And God willing, if they want to keep going down this path.

Well, I have a podcast called I Hate Bill Maher.

It's all on there.

The main stuff is almost all real time.

And there's a Patreon you can subscribe to.

I've talked about stuff from Politically Incorrect.

They are very funny.

Will makes it very funny, even though it sounds like a slog.

It is not because it's Will and he's great.

Feels like a slog.

Francesca, where can people find you?

You can find me on youtube.com/slash frannie, Fio, F-R-A-N-I-F-I-O.

I have the Obituation Room podcast there live Tuesdays, 1 p.m.

Pacific, 4 p.m.

Eastern.

Also doing some deep dives.

So yeah, get at that.

And thank you so much for having me.

Thank you, the listener, so much for making it this far.

The amount of DMs that I have received over the two plus years of doing this podcast from people who are like, Can you please do a Bill Maher episode?

Because he keeps basically turning my liberal parents into right-wingers, and I don't know what to do.

I hope that maybe we've made something that you can send to them.

And if not, I hope that at least we have entertained you for a couple of hours.

I love you so much.

Thank you for being here.

And until next time, stay fruity.