This interview appeared in the recent print issue of SPIN, and was done before the election and before Joe Biden stepped down. The rest of it is timeless, baby.
For a long time now, Bill Maher, host of the magnificently smart and incendiary and hilarious talk show Real Time With Bill Maher, has been the conscience of America. And, like our relationship with our own conscience, it’s not always pretty.
There are more outrageous comedians, there may even be braver ones, but there aren’t any smarter ones, or more thoughtful commentators on our currently sorry-ass country and its politics, bruised culture and confused and confusing social issues.
Bill knows what he’s talking about, which right there separates him from most people on the airwaves, or whatever waves you get your information from. But what really puts him in a class on his own is that he is equally critical of the left as he is the right. He shreds both sides, the looniest edge of the woke left and the dark-hearted far right. Everyone in the middle is fair game too. Which pisses, eventually, everyone off.
He started on TV with Politically Incorrect, in 1993, on Comedy Central, before moving to ABC in 1997, until they got cold feet and cancelled the show in 2002 because of a comment he made about 9/11 terrorists not being cowards. HBO snapped him up and in 2003 Real Time launched. He’s been consistently on TV for 31 years, and is just shy of David Letterman’s record of 33 years as a late night talk show host. Maher, having just renewed for another two seasons, is likely to at least match Letterman.
This interview was finalized a week after Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump, so at press time we didn’t know if Biden subsequently dropped out of the race, as he was being widely urged to. So what Bill recently told Maureen Dowd of The New York Times takes on a particular resonance, and illustrates his ability to cut to the bone: “Let’s be honest, the only thing that the two parties really have in common is that they’re both hoping their candidates die.”
Bob Guccione Jr.: Who do you think should be the Democratic Nominee?
Bill Maher: [The President] is going to be Ruth Bader Biden. What he is doing is really selfish. What she did was selfish — Obama had her over for lunch and said ‘now might be a good time to step down, while I’m still in office and can appoint your successor’ and she didn’t buy it.
Nobody wants this match up. I was pushing for Newsom, even though he’s too woke for me. He’s strong and smart, and I think he would, like good politicians do, tack to the center if he was a national candidate. But polls [earlier this year] show him losing to Trump worse than anyone else. Because of woke shit. He’s the governor of the wokest state in the country and people noticed, and they don’t like it, and that is a giant hole to dig out of.
Trump doesn’t believe in Democracy, true, but these people don’t believe in biology.
Earlier this year we had the absurdity of a progressive Democratic Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, asking Democrats to not support a sitting Democratic President’s reelection. Can we get our heads out of our asses on the left?
Well, no, is the short answer.
What’s wrong with the left? We seem to shoot ourselves in the foot and ask for more bullets when we finish.
The actual issues that are important to people, especially economic ones, the Democrats usually come out on top, and by a wide margin. Even the margins for sensible gun laws, which they obviously don’t have in [places like] Missouri, are overwhelming, even among the people of Missouri. Yet Republicans keep winning elections because of social issues, because Democrats strike them as crazy about a whole host of issues that are a lot closer to home.
Pocket book issues matter, but so do things like what they’re telling my kids in school. Do they think Biden handled Ukraine well? Yeah, maybe, but that’s a long way away, Ukraine. It’s not really in my house. You know what’s in my house? My kid coming home and saying they divided us into oppressors and oppressed in school, and what does that mean, mommy? I’m five years old. Am I an oppressor?
That kind of stuff really bugs people, and people don’t like this world where they’re always walking on eggshells, worrying about everything they ever texted, or emailed, or blogged, or searched for, or witnessed, or wore. They don’t like that world, that seems to them to be the Left World.
I’ve said many times, whatever anyone on the left does, the whole left has to wear it. Many of the Democrats for instance never came out for defunding the police but it was a left thing. No one on the right was for defunding the police, they’re for supporting the police, and we’re a binary kind of country, you only get those two points of view. So, to most voters, who don’t necessarily follow things that closely, that’s a left thing — you want to defund the police, you look at everything as a social construct.
Just a host of dumb ideas that cling to the left, and make people go, you know, Trump is crazy, I don’t like him, but some of this stuff is even crazier. Trump doesn’t believe in Democracy, true, but these people don’t believe in biology.
Are we really such terrible human beings that we have to be so ostracised and punished all the time?
I think this is one of the reasons Trump’s doing better – better! — with immigrants than he did in 2016 and 2020. Really, Democrats can’t beat the guy who calls them rapists, and they come from shithole countries? Immigrants worked really hard to get here, and they don’t like this unending negativity that comes from the left, always tearing the country down, we’re irredeemably racist, always looking back hundreds of years and how awful we were, and saying dumb things about how we’ll never get better, we’re systemically awful. And they’re like, are you kidding? Do you know where I came from? What goes on in my country, why I walked a thousand miles to get here?
I get that. I’m sure there’s lot of immigrants who hear Trump say “shithole” and go, “of course it was a shithole! Why do you think I came here?”
And once people get here, it’s amazing how quickly they pull up the ladder. People have this idea that every Mexican American is a bleeding heart for the people crashing their way through the border, and, no, what they’re saying is “I live here now and I don’t want this guy coming and taking my job.”
People used to take a joke, now nobody can joke and nothing is funny. How did we get there?
When people say, “this generation is softer” — that’s what everyone thinks. They thought that of my generation, the boomers, the WWII people who had us thought we were soft. People think that because they are, every generation does get softer.
I think this is something that happens in every civilization until the civilization collapses. Basically this is an outcome of being very successful. Being rich, comfortable, successful, you get soft, and it gets worse and worse. I remember when the Millennials were the newest generation, and we were all talking about, “oh my God, what a bunch of pussies!” and we were opining that the next generation, which turned out to be Gen Z, there’s going to be a backlash because it can’t go any further, and it got way worse! They made Millennials look like Marines.
Smartphones made people dumb, and made people worse, it exacerbated all the qualities that are not attractive in people. Made people shady, made them needy, mean, and fake — it’s so easy to fake something — and passive aggressive, it’s so easy to ghost people.
Even answering the phone gives people anxiety — “Oh my God, who is this?” — even when it says right on your phone who this is!
What do you think of Robert Kennedy Jr?
I like him. He’s definitely not insane. I’m closer to him on medical issues than I am to a lot of western medical views, but he goes too far.
I had him on my podcast and he sounded a lot more reasonable than some of the things he’s written. If you just go by what he’s written, you come away thinking, is there any conspiracy theory you don’t believe? Let’s start with that list.
But generally, the idea that he’s skeptical of western medical science, so am I! The idea that he thinks we handled COVID horribly, and overreacted, so did I.
My advice to him, he didn’t take it, was that you were known as an environmental lawyer, everybody loved you on the left, you were the guy who stood up for the environment. Make this idea about vaccines part of that. Your thesis was we were posioning ourselves with the environment, and we’re still poisoning ourselves. I’m not saying vaccines are poison at all. What I’m saying is, one reason people are so sick, is the medical establishment itself.
I thought he could weave that much better into a coherent campaign, and get rid of some of that baggage that struck people as completely crazy.
The COVID vaccine was politicized into if you were for it, you were good, if you were skeptical or against it, you were evil and shunned or worse. But what’s wrong with saying “More people didn’t die because of the vaccine, but in some cases it hurt people”?
Absolutely! I don’t understand why people can’t get their heads around that. Part of it is because of the indoctrination, from the liberal media, which is that any sort of questioning of this will scare people and they won’t get the vaccine. Well some people shouldn’t get the vaccine! Not everyone needed it.
Among the horrible things I think this country did in their reaction to COVID, is that they didn’t respect natural immunity. I was never scared of COVID. When I got COVID I barely knew I had it. That could be, probably is, because of the vaccine, but also it could be that I never would have gotten it in the first place. We just don’t know. I’ve always maintained about vaccines, just don’t tell me you know what you don’t know.
If you think Israel is the worst country in the world, you know nothing about the world.
Why is the world so upside down that to be critical of the war in Gaza you are branded an antisemite, and people are protesting, effectively, in favor of Hamas and saying that Israel deserved October 7?
When you look at everything in this world through the lens of oppressor and oppressed, and you have college kids who no longer really take history, as we’d understand it, so they don’t really understand it or have perspective on this issue, and they very often have professors who are ideologically driven, not there to just teach them, they’re there to indoctrinate them, it’s not surprising. If you think Israel is the worst country in the world, you know nothing about the world. The President of Burundi made a statement that he wants his citizens to stone gay people. That’s not that uncommon in a number of African countries, some are moving towards legislation that being gay is punishable by death.
Of course the supreme irony is that, these are liberals, standing with Hamas, where there are no laws against child marriage, marital rape, all the things that liberals are supposed to be against.
What gets left out of the whole discussion, is the whole Islam of it all, meaning a religion is a system of ideas, and if one of the ideas is martyrdom, and that’s a positive, you’re fighting an enemy that thinks dying is good. Until there’s a revolution within the Muslim world, until they stand up to this stuff, things like this are going to keep happening. Of course Hamas is going to use human shields! They’ve even strapped bombs onto children, things that would be unthinkable. Put it this way, can you imagine Israel using human shields? Of course not, because they never would.
People throw around words like “genocide” and “apartheid” but they don’t understand what those words mean. If Israel wanted to commit genocide they could, because they have the weapons to do it. If Hamas had those weapons they’d use them in the next 5 minutes. And Israel is anything but apartheid — in Israel, Arabs vote, Arabs are part of the Parliament, Arabs are judges, they participate in society and they like living in Israel and have said so in polling.
On your show Van Jones made the point that the constant browbeating of men as toxic is turning men off of wanting to be part of a more progressive, equal society. What do you think about that?
I think as with everything, America always overreracts. America can never react to anything, it has to overreact. Look, masculinity has always been toxic, there’s no doubt about it — men have prosecuted most of the violence in the history of the world, and a lot of that violence was combatting people who were worse. Yes, we were violent in WWII, because we had to be. Men are still, for whatever reason, testosterone, or whatever courses through our blood, violent and — the word they love to say — toxic. But they kind of did go too far and as I think Van was implying, they made it that just being a man was somehow wrong. And look, you cannot root out all the toxicity in anything, like masculinity. I mean, women don’t want men to be pussies either, it’s not attractive to them either.
There are men who are bad — bad towards women, bad towards men. But I don’t think all masculinity is toxic. Is it toxic for a man to express attraction for a woman? We’ve been conditioned to believe that it is.
I’m at a loss to describe what it must be like to be 23 years old and trying to navigate your world sexually these days. First of all, it’s somehow uncool to be heterosexual, somehow that got to be unfashionable. Is there anything wrong with saying that it’s a default setting for human beings, heterosexuality? That’s not to say, at all, that we think it’s wrong to be anything but.
I think this is what bothers a lot of parents about what’s happening in schools. Yes, teach kids that it’s OK to be anything. But the constant pounding into their minds — kids are going to think, am I in the right body? And of course kids are so confused and ignorant about sexuality to begin with, so to throw that on them? Again, I don’t think it’s wrong to say heterosexuality is the default setting.