Bill Maher Slams The Left's Woke Arrogance, Anti-Trump Hate

Keneci Channel

The liberal stand-up comedian and HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher host is currently on tour in the southeast with stops in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee. He spoke to local left-wing media outlet AL.com ahead of a show next week in Birmingham.

Maher lamented the bastardization of what it means to be a 'liberal' by perennially outraged far-left woke activists.

"I attract mostly a liberal crowd, but liberal is different than woke," The left-wing comedian said. "To me, woke, if we want to use that broad term, is something that is not an extension of liberalism. It’s very often the opposite of what an old school liberal like me believes."

He claimed that while he votes for Democrat Party candidates in elections, he does not feel attached to one particular party.

"I’ve never been someone who was part of any specific party, per se," Maher said. "I usually vote Democratic, but it depends on the person. Certainly in the age of Trump, they’re never going to get me there with the Republicans. But there are many Republicans who are not Trump Republicans. And they have a good point, that there is that faction of the left that we will call woke who’s gone of the deep end."

The Real Time host warned against the left-wing-fuelled division in the United States. "This country is falling apart at the seams," he said. "Half the people are not going to self-deport. You see these tweets and memes about owning and destroying the other side. Get over it. You’re not owning or destroying anybody. No one’s going anywhere. We have to learn to live together again."

Maher blamed most of the division on the left and in Democrat-run states and cities.

"So I find more of that spirit is possible in a place like the cities you mentioned, whereas San Francisco, that’s going to be a little problematic for m," the comedian said, describing the difference between audience reactions to his jokes in conservative cities versus left-wing cities like San Francisco. "They’re a little too politically correct. There’s going to be a lot of groaning at some of the things I say, and that’s not what a comedy show is supposed to be. Political correctness has always been the enemy of comedy. That’s been my banner from the beginning."

The comedian called out leftists who hate and feel superior to former president Donald Trump and his supporters.

"I constantly say it, you can hate Trump. You can’t hate all the people who like him -- it’s half the country," Maher said. "And you can’t set yourself up as some sort of superior moral paragon, because this is your political belief, and somebody else has another one. There are obviously areas where, yes, if somebody’s advocating cannibalism, I think you can claim the moral high ground if you’re anti. I feel like that’s the Achilles heel of the left right now. They identify issues mostly by what they can feel superior to another person for."

Maher said the coronavirus pandemic exposed the left's self-righteous arrogance.

"COVID is a great example. If I’m for more safety, I’m a better person than you," he said mimicking a woke leftist. "Well, we can take that to the nth degree and never leave our houses. I believe we tried that in 2020: The great medical advancement of hiding. It doesn’t make you a better person if you’re wearing three masks or if you want 10 booster shots. But that is the subtext to all of that, I think. First of all, it’s not true. It doesn’t make you a better person."

The left-wing comedian pushed back against the notion that everyone ought to implicitly trust in the pronouncements issued by Big Pharma.

"And medical matters are completely debatable," Maher said. "This idea that the medical establishment should be able to say, 'Just do what we say. When have we ever been wrong?' A lot would be my answer to that. You’ve been wrong a lot. You told us that the vaccines would get us out of this. Well they didn’t. What they do is they stop death. But you said they would stop transmission of the disease. They don’t stop you from getting it, and they don’t stop you from transmitting it. What they do is stop you from dying if you do get it. Well that’s very different than what you said a year ago. So don’t just stand there in your white coat saying 'We have all the answers.' You don’t. And just to throw in with Dr. Fauci(controversial top Biden administration medical adviser) doesn’t mean you’re a morally superior person. That attitude is what annoys people, I think, mostly about the left."

Reacting to recent banning of prominent figures like congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and mRNA inventor Robert Malone, Maher slammed Big Tech for shutting down important debates.

"I think the answer to bad speech is more speech," the comedian told AL.com.  "I’m certainly not the first one to say that. You can find that from esteemed people on the Supreme Court over the years, mostly liberals. That is the answer to bad speech. It’s not to stop it. And Twitter doesn’t have any real calling to do that. They’re a private company. Obviously I understand that they can. But they, for example, shut down debate on the lab leak theory and had to walk that back, so did Facebook. Now there’s no political dimension to how the virus started. It should not be a political issue at all. It is outrageous that they said you can’t even talk about the idea that this virus may have started in a lab. Why? It may have. It was always a possibility. Everyone now agrees that could be the origin of the virus. So just put that up as your lodestar. This is the company that said you can’t even talk about that. That’s dangerous. I don’t want that company making the rules about what we can and can’t hear. If Marjorie Taylor Greene said something nutty, then let people swarm her on Twitter and point out how nutty it is. And let’s let a thousand flowers bloom. But I’m never going to be the one who lines up with censorship, no matter who it is."