I couldn’t even get through the last “New Rule.”
I’ve been watching Real Time with Bill Maher since it first started on HBO in 2003. As of tonight, November 13, 2020, I am done with Bill Maher, and I will never watch another episode of Real Time ever again. Never. Done. Finished. Q.E.D.
This has been a long time coming and I’ve known for a while that it would happen eventually, but tonight’s “New Rule” finally pushed me over the edge.
For at least two years now I’ve been ragging on Bill for this ridiculous, toxic idea he has, that he seems to espouse on every show, that somehow the Democratic Party — meaning, the Party itself, actual elected officials and actual candidates for office — is directly responsible, should take the blame, and, critically, should be punished electorally, for the most obnoxious anecdotal rhetorical and behavioral excesses of anyone who is perceived or presumed to support, align with, or vote for, Democrats.
Which was the central theme of tonight’s “New Rule”:
You have to wear everything [that] anyone on your side does. Republicans are the party of “Don’t wear masks,” kids in cages, “Lock Her Up”, and Democrats are the party of every hypersensitive social-justice-warrior woke bullshit story in the news.
Read that again. Do we all see what’s wrong with this picture?
Of course we do: “Don’t wear masks” is something that actual Republican elected officials — up to and including the President of the United States — have actually said, promoted, and advocated; “kids in cages” is official Republican policy that actual Republicans have actually carried out; “Lock Her Up” was practically the theme of the Republican National Convention in 2016. These are things that the Republican Party itself and actual elected Republicans are genuinely guilty of and directly responsible for.
Name one “hypersensitive social-justice-warrior woke bullshit story in the news” that can legitimately be pinned on the Democratic Party or on any actual elected Democrat, let alone in anywhere near analogous fashion to what Maher said Republicans are the “party of” as set forth above. I’ll wait.
As I fumed over that, he followed that with this:
They’re the party that disappears people, and tries to make them apologize for ridiculous things.
As I was watching the rapid slideshow of Al Franken, Aziz Ansari, Garrison Keillor, Meghan Kelly, Roseanne Barr, Louis C.K., Chris Matthews, Woody Allen, Ellen DeGeneres, Kevin Hart and Anne Hathaway that accompanied this risible statement, I couldn’t help but think, What did the Democratic Party do to these people? (Apart from Franken, perhaps.) Did the Democratic Party “disappear” Chris Matthews? Which Democratic senator, congressperson, governor, candidate, &c., “trie[d] to make” Louis C.K. “apologize for ridiculous things”? Apparently the Democratic Party is also to blame for the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes releasing their top draft pick because they found out he bullied a disabled Black kid four years ago in 8th grade.
And all of this supposedly proves that Democrats lack “common sense.”
At this point I couldn’t watch anymore; I don’t know what else he said and I don’t want to know. That he would make this counterfactual, counterproductive bullshit concept the central theme of his closing “New Rule” monologue less than a week after we celebrated Joe Biden’s win with a spontaneous national and global outpouring of pure joy, on the very day that we officially flipped not one but two red states blue for the first time in decades and Biden’s vote total topped 78 million and still counting, is incomprehensible, appalling, staggeringly tone-deaf, and unforgivable.
I was a fan of and enjoyed this show for a very long time, and even defended Bill here and elsewhere from what I thought was unfair criticism, but this is absolutely the last straw. I watch Real Time to be entertained, to hear smart people debate important issues, and to laugh at the comedy bits; not to be scolded and browbeaten and come away feeling anxious and depressed. And I certainly don’t watch it to get inundated with Both Siderism, false equivalence, double standards, and this incredibly toxic and dangerous notion that only the non-authoritarian political party, the one that doesn’t live in a paracosm and deny reality, the one that isn’t wholly-owned by polluters, profiteers and predators, the one that didn’t nominate Donald Trump,
[has] to wear everything [that] anyone on your side does.
No, Bill, it doesn’t. Certainly not because you say so. The fact is, it’s people like you who push people to vote Republican because these imaginary “woke” liberals in your head are so darned annoying and you insist upon hanging them around the necks of every Democrat who’s trying his or her darnedest to arrest the authoritarian death spiral that this country is in, and we’re in it because people like you think it’s a good idea to elect a demented racist gangster and his perfidious power-mad Party so that “woke” liberals whom Democrats have no control over will be forced to rethink their tactics. What an absolute crock of shit.
Goodbye, and good riddance. Real Time is over.
If you’re interested in how it got to this point, follow me below the fold.
Let’s start in February 2019, when former Senator Claire McCaskill appeared on Real Time and Bill asked her why people in Missouri think Democrats are crazy. In her answer, she made reference to a State Senator from Missouri who had put on her Facebook page that Donald Trump should be assassinated (which I had never heard about until then, and looked up to verify), and:
...the people, frankly, who go in restaurants, and get up in the face of someone...
MAHER: And scream at people, yes.
McCASKILL: ...and scream at people.
Hearing this, I wrote:
McCaskill both makes and fails to make a critically-important distinction between Democrats as a Party, as elected officeholders and political candidates, and some random anecdotal episodes of obnoxious behavior that the [Party itself] is in no way responsible for but somehow takes the blame and suffers the electoral and political consequences. What is missing from this exchange is what is missing from every conversation I’ve ever seen, heard or read about how annoying liberals can be, and Maher — because he buys into it too — utterly failed to call this out or complete the circle.
For the record, I started writing about how ridiculous it was to vote Republican because liberals can be kind of annoying sometimes, way back in 2017. I don’t know exactly when this notion found a permanent home in Bill Maher’s head (and on his show), but by February 2019 it was clear that
the only “crazy Democrats” McCaskill could think of were a single State Senator whom no one’s heard of and a couple of random people who yelled things at Republicans in restaurants that one time
and that there was, and is, a
double standard by which the Democratic Party is responsible for Jussie Smollett and should suffer electorally as a result of his antics, but the GOP is not responsible for Christopher Hasson and shouldn’t lose any votes because of him.
[Jussie Smollett is the Black actor who was arrested in Feburary 2019 for faking a hate crime; Christopher Hasson is the white nationalist and domestic terrorist who was arrested in February 2019 for plotting to kill various Democrats, media figures, and “leftists in general.”]
Barely a month later, Maher blamed Democrats for the Hollywood college-admissions scandal:
There’s a real liberal face on this scandal. Now, we don’t know all of the people involved, and I’m sure there were some conservatives. But it looks like coastal elites. … Have you ever wondered why, so many people, “How could you vote for Trump?” Or, “Why do they hate Democrats so much?” This is exactly why.
Of course, none of the people involved in that “scandal” were Democratic politicians, elected officials, candidates, or party leaders, and it’s impossible to fathom how voting Republican, voting for Trump, or for that matter voting Democratic, could have any effect one way or the other on the behavior in question. Addressing the host in the second person I admonished that
people only “hate Democrats” because of occasional annoying lefties because you tell them to [and the conservative media tells them to]. ... I’ve been watching your show a long time, and this may be the most ignorant thing you’ve ever said, and for some reason you keep saying it in one form or another and letting your guests get away with saying it when you should be calling it out for the bullsh** it is, and you should know what bullsh** it is.
In June 2019 I wrote that Bill Maher’s Both Siderism Reaches Quantum Level, when he ragged on “all the liberals” for having “gone nuts” when Donald Trump said:
Our inner cities; African-Americans, Hispanics, are living in hell, because it’s so dangerous; you walk down the street, you get shot.
but having not “gone nuts” when Cory Booker said:
I hear gunshots in my neighborhood. I think I’m the only one, I hope I’m the only one on this panel here that had seven people shot in their neighborhood just last week.
Thankfully, guests Joy Reid, Adam Gopnik and Max Brooks (who also happened to be on tonight’s show) were there to disabuse Bill of this ridiculous false equivalence. At the end of the diary I wrote:
For the first time, I’m having genuine reservations about whether or not to keep watching when the show returns from hiatus in August. Of course, I’ll probably still watch in order to see if Bill manages to get this Both Siderist disease out of his bloodstream. But for a guy who’s constantly accusing us of “helping Trump win” by being annoying and yelling things in restaurants, nothing is helping Trump win more than this relentless, wholly unironic, destructive wave of both-sides-use-shovels Both Siderism.
[”Both-sides-use-shovels” refers to an aphorism that I came up with to describe Both Siderism, viz., if one side uses shovels to plant trees, and the other side uses shovels to bash people’s brains in, the only thing we hear is “Both sides use shovels!” which, while technically true, is unhelpful and pointless.]
Two months later in August 2019, after shootings in El Paso, TX, where the shooter took specific cues from Trump and targeted the very people that Trump is always targeting, and in Dayton, OH, Maher could only say that the latter shooter — and this is a direct quote — “had left-wing stuff that we found.” Me again:
Maher’s continuing desperation to find and create false equivalence, to shore up his “I-go-after-the-liberals-too” bona fides ... continues to trouble me. There are things to criticize on our side — fringy left-wingers do exist, after all, and there are some pretty terrible ideas over there — without made-up bullshit and false equivalence, and without hanging that “left-wing stuff” around the neck of the entire Democratic Party whenever we “find” that someone “has” [it].
(emphasis added).
Within a month it was clear that Bill Maher’s New Shtick Is Getting Really Old Really Fast. This time it was not on Real Time but on Morning Joe when he said:
We hear these terms, “snowflakes,” “safe rooms,” and stuff like that, and I think people, they don’t really follow policy that closely; ... They just know that when they read these little stories, on and on and on, it always seems to be the left that is defending something that’s so ridiculous that they say to themselves, “I can’t let these people take over the country. Yeah, I don’t think Trump is good, but I can’t let people this weak take over, this fragile. Fragility is not a selling point when you’re running for leader of the free world.”
Except that “weak” and “fragile” left-wing college students — real or imagined— are not actually “running for leader of the free world.” Maher rhetorically erased any line that might exist between these annoying “woke” liberals — again, be they real or imagined — and, e.g., Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Sheldon Whitehouse, Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, Stacy Abrams, Andrew Cuomo, Barack Obama, et al. Me again:
Not only that, but he accepts this as a rational thought, and acceptable behavior: to not vote Democratic — i.e., to vote against altruistic and compassionate public policies and instead elect selfish, cruel, corrupt, perfidious, power-mad, warmongering, theocratic oligarchs — because some anonymous campus liberals somewhere that you heard about that one time seem “fragile.”
Meanwhile, no one — least of all Bill Maher — seems to be concerned about people who “read these little stories” about, oh, I don’t know, the Nazis in Charlottesville, the El Paso shooter, the “Straight Pride Parade,” and whatever other crimes against humanity and society that right-wingers commit on a daily basis, thinking they “can’t let these people take over the country.”
...
I’ve written time and time again … about how this is the worst double standard in politics: only Democrats are responsible for the rhetorical excesses and bad behavior of their perceived supporters, only Democrats are punished electorally for it, no one seems to have a problem with that, and no one seems to notice that it doesn’t work both ways.
In June of this year I got just about to the end of my rope with Bill, as I reached the end of my rope with his frequent guest Andrew M*th*rF***ing Sullivan:
Maher just sat there like a potted plant while Sullivan spent practically his entire talking time complaining and concern trolling about how awful the imaginary over-the-top caricatures of left-wing liberals who exist only in the annals of conservative fan fiction and in his own head are behaving these days, exerting inordinate amounts of power and influence over everyone and everything, and how very very bad that is for democracy and for America and especially the Democratic Party.
I can’t tell you how heartened I was when [Malcolm] Nance piped in and pointed out that none of what Sullivan claimed was coming from these hordes of far-left zealot cartoon characters was actually coming from Democratic Party leaders.
It was only a matter of time. Indeed, I anticipated being done with Bill Maher a few months back when he had on Bari Weiss to complain about “cancel culture,” one of Bill’s own ubiquitous pet peeves, which was interesting because the only thing on which Bari Weiss spends more time and energy than complaining about “cancel culture,” which she describes as “punishment” and “social murder” for having the “wrong thoughts” and making sure the people who have those thoughts “can’t be heard,” is canceling, punishing, and socially murdering anyone who has the wrong thoughts (i.e., non-Bari-approved thoughts) about Israel-Palestine and making sure that those people can’t be heard.
The show wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it gave me some insight into what these complaints about “cancel culture” are really about:
“[C]ancel culture” is not a person or even a group of people that can be identified by name or face; it’s an abstract, amorphous aggregation of social-media content that the Mahers, Weisses and Sullivans of the world talk about as if it were a golem from Jewish folklore. It’s a strawman, basically, against whom the “victims” of “cancel culture” can’t retaliate in reciprocal fashion because it doesn’t have a name, a face, a job that they can get it fired from, or a platform that they can get it kicked off of.
That’s why their only solution is, and has been, to hang “cancel culture” around the necks of the national Democratic Party, its candidates and officeholders, by implying that a vote for a Democrat is a vote for “cancel culture,” concern-trolling about Democrats losing votes (or voters being unable to support Democrats) because of it, and by extension, helping Republicans get elected — even though actual Democrats are in no way responsible for it and neither Party, in office, can actually do anything about it legislatively or administratively.
That last paragraph is exactly what Bill Maher did on his show tonight, in express, forceful, direct, and unambiguous terms. And that’s why I am never watching his show again.