The Importance of Bill Maher’s Liberal Contrarianism

By Kyle Smith

Monday, April 19, 2021

 

As the veteran late-night comedy hosts have become increasingly political and increasingly partisan, only one of them has managed not to become completely predictable and boring: Bill Maher.

 

Not counting new entrant Greg Gutfeld, who launched his five-day-a-week show Gutfeld! two weeks ago, the late-night hosts rely heavily on repackaging Democratic Party talking points as jokes. Maher does this too, often. But the host of HBO’s Friday-night mainstay Real Time with Bill Maher is the only one of the left-of-center comics who occasionally says things that might displease his audience. Last February, he committed the triple blasphemy of mocking Bernie Sanders, defending Mike Bloomberg, and suggesting liberals are too quick to cry racism — “Bloomberg must be the front-runner because liberals are calling him a racist.” When his Los Angeles audience booed, Maher chided, “Keep booing. That’s how you lost the last election.” Maher regularly features guests that progressives would very much like ruled out of bounds, such as National Review correspondent Kevin D. Williamson and the apostate from New York Times-ism Bari Weiss, and treats them with respect instead of ridicule.

 

Maher aligns with liberal Democrats on most things and gets plenty of clapter when he mocks conservatives, red states, and Donald Trump. On Friday night though, he caught his audience off-guard yet again when he conducted a friendly interview with Sharon Osbourne, who was kicked off the show The Talk “after a network investigation,” believe it or not, of her remarks defending Piers Morgan, who in turn was under fire for criticizing Meghan Markle. (Because Markle is of mixed race, all criticism of her is racist.) Osbourne said on The Talk, “I feel even like I’m about to be put in the electric chair because I have a friend who many people think is a racist so that makes me a racist.”

 

Maher suggested that Osbourne had “lost her cool” in discussing the matter with black co-host Sheryl Underwood on The Talk but said the remedy should be apologizing, not firing. “How about, ‘I shouldn’t do that, I won’t do it again,’” he said. “I mean, you did issue an apology for this.” Osbourne was dismissed and issued a groveling statement as detractors suggested she needed reeducation. To that, Maher said, “I’m sorry, I’m 65, you’re 68. I know who I am! I don’t need reeducation. Do you need reeducation? 68, you’ve been all over the world, you’re married to a rock star, you’ve been with all the A-listers and rock ’n’ roll. Like, f*** ’em. Like you need to, ‘Race, tell me all about it.’ It’s fantasy.” Maher then slammed race theorist and author Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility for arguing that “You have two choices if you’re white, you’re either a racist — or a racist and you don’t know it. I’m not down with that.”

 

Maher is consistently strong on the culture of freedom of expression, cancel culture, and the like, but later in the same episode he went so far as to defend Ron DeSantis, and red-state governors in general, for their approach to COVID. In a blistering seven-minute monologue Maher tore into medical professional who misled us about the pandemic, media outlets pushing “panic porn” for ratings (“the U.S. national media reported almost 90 percent bad news even as things were getting better”), and conservatives who have “some loopy ideas about COVID.” But he reserved most of his scorn for liberals who are making disturbingly out-of-touch miscalculations about risks. Maher cited a shocking poll that showed two-thirds of Democrats believe the chances of being hospitalized if you get COVID are 20 percent or higher. (Actually, it’s less than 5 percent.)

 

Maher noted that there is a massive societal cost to this, and it’s being borne by our children. He cited the “exaggerated view of the danger of COVID to, and the mortality rate among, children. All of which explains why the states with the highest share of schools that are closed are all blue states.” Maher suggested conservative media should be responsible for “climate change denial” on the right but that the liberal media should be asked, “How did your audience wind up believing such a bunch of crap about COVID?” He segued to the media’s bizarre fixation on scolding beachgoers for supposedly spreading infection even though it appears “the beach is the best place to avoid it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

 

Liberals blinded by their priors about Republican governors are, Maher noted, willfully ignoring good news from Florida and Texas. “I’ve read that the governor of Florida reads,” he said. The audience laughed, excepting Maher to pull the rug out with the usual joke about Republican stupidity, but he didn’t. Instead, he described Governor Ron DeSantis as “a voracious consumer of the scientific literature and maybe that’s why he protected his most vulnerable population, the elderly, way better than did the governor of New York. Those are just facts.” Yet when everything gets filtered through politics, “If their side says COVID is nothing, our side has to say it’s everything. [President] Trump said it would go away like a miracle and we said it was World War Z.”

 

Maher then drew a perspicacious parallel I haven’t seen before between Trump’s speculation about whether injecting disinfectants could cure COVID and progressives who spent last spring spraying disinfectant all over their groceries. “It turned out 19 percent of America was literally drenching the fruit in Clorox,” he said. (The facts are even worse: The poll to which Maher referred showed 39 percent of Americans had done high-risk things with disinfectants.) “All that paranoia about surfaces was bulls*** anyway,” he added, then scolded the media for downplaying the strong links between obesity and severe COVID cases: “It is the key piece of the puzzle, by far the most pertinent factor, but you dare not speak its name.”

 

Maher’s segment drew scattered, unenthusiastic applause but no boos. That’s a good sign: It indicates that when they’re getting the info from someone they like and trust, liberals can handle the truth about COVID. May the rest of the media follow Maher’s lead and start to reeducate their liberal consumers about where the COVID risks are, and where they are not.