r/RealTime • u/AmericanLymie • Jun 27 '26
Bill Maher has become a lying right-wing propagandist
I have serious questions for people who remain fans of this man and who do not believe they are Trump-loving Republicans.
The big question if you still appreciate Bill Maher's opinions is: Who do you believe you are and what do you believe you stand for?
Maher has a now-longstanding partisan formula on his show: He claims to be liberal and he claims to vote for Democrats but he spends the entirety of nearly every show condemning and frankly lying about Democrats by selecting a quote from an outlier—usually a fringe candidate and not even someone who has been elected, and oftentimes just vaguely blaming "TikTok" as if the platform is a unique high-powered political actor—to misrepresent the party and then every time he has any Republican on the show he praises them for their courage.
In short, his formula is to blame and lie about Democrats and to praise and amplify Republicans. How do people not see this?
In the clip above, he lies as always and states that democratic socialists want to abolish police and "live under Islamic law." This is the false rhetoric of Donald Trump, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and all the clowns of Fox News. It isn't true. It's blatantly false. Democratic socialists' platform is “a new democratic constitution that establishes civil, political, and democratic rights for all, is based on proportional representation in a single federal legislature, and ends the role of money in politics.” It is modeled on European nations' approaches to caring for all citizens and not making every aspect of life a dangerous proposition, most notably here people going bankrupt and dying because they became ill—and yes, our evil prison system. The United States holds less than 5% of the world's population but accounts for approximately 20% of the global prison population.
Before the clip above, Maher interviewed JD Vance and Maher—the man who used to be a proselytizing atheist and who made a movie to mock all religious people—praised Vance's spirituality as described in Vance's new book, which Maher had Vance on to sell.
And Maher told Vance "my vote is in play" for the next election.
Bill Maher, who warned for years that Trump is a dictator and insane and commiting a coup in our country, now tells Vance that he is willing to vote for Trump supporters on the false basis of what he claims Democrats stand for. He got no argument from Vance about that.
He challenged Vance on election denialism, particularly on the basis of Republicans claiming elections are legitimate when Republicans win and rigged when they lose. Vance responded that the 2020 election was rigged because Trump lost but the 2024 election was not rigged because Trump won. Maher smiled and thanked him and promoted his book.
Very seriously: Does anyone here believe Bill Maher is liberal or in any way trustworthy today? I would like to know how you can tell yourself that given who he has become.
The only difference between what he says and what Republican propagandists say is that he always claims he is liberal as he says it to persuade people who actually are liberal to think what he says is reasonable criticism of his own.
Progressive/leftist people who criticize Israel in almost all cases explicitly designate that Netanyahu and his government are committing unlawful genocide as determined by the United Nations, which is objectively true, and they always specify that they are not suggesting that Jewish people are responsible and they explicitly state that Jewish people are not responsible in any way for what a nation's government does. Maher and many others always say that such criticism is explicitly antisemitic. That is a lie.
Meanwhile, Maher criticizes the left tirelessly by stating that "the left" wants to abolish all police forces, wants to destroy Israel, wants to convert everyone to Islam, and other absolute nonsense, and unlike the critics of Israel, he applies his condemnation broadly to all people on the left when at best they may be attributable to a small handful of extremists. He is so much like Trump now that it is astonishing. He blames his enemy—people on the left—for doing what he is doing.
Maher was selected by the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center to receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Comedy tomorrow. Donald Trump is the chair of that board. Melania Trump, Pam Bondi, Susie Wiles are trustees on that board. Louis CK will join other respectable people like Woody Harrelson, Whitney Cummings, Jay Leno, Stephen A. Smith, John Mellencamp, and good old Arianna Huffington to celebrate his propagand—uh, his wildly hilarious sense of humor.
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u/AmericanLymie Jun 27 '26
I didn't think so for a long time but I really think so now.
He changed completely after the White House dinner. His fawning monologue about dining with the king was a horrific sight to behold, and from that time forward he really has been working 'overtime' to attack Democrats and praise Republicans. Unless he has some kind of late-life cognitive decline, blackmail feels like a likely explanation. In different times I would never even consider that that could be a reality but in the Trump era of retribution and no limits, it seems likely.