Bill Maher likes to say he hasn’t changed — that it’s his audience who changed.
But he certainly did evolve, and I can pinpoint the precise year that evolution began: 2014.
That was the year students at the University of California, Berkeley, protested Maher’s December commencement keynote. Though he ended up delivering the address, the incident chafed and bruised Maher’s thin skin. You see, some of the students didn’t like Maher’s take on Islam; they felt his comments had crossed a line from fair criticism to overt racism. Maher argued that the tolerance they were demanding was entirely lacking from the religion they were championing.
I am not debating either point here. My point is that the experience changed him. It soured him to liberalism. He hasn’t been the same since.
On Friday night, he began his show with a taunting, “Yeah, I did it again, bitches. … Fuck you. I like these dinners,” referring to a dinner he attended with the President, Kid Rock and Stephen A. Smith this week.
Maher spends a lot of each “Real Time” episode mocking the Left — while turning a blind eye to his dinner companion as he literally sets the world ablaze.
The contrast between Maher of the aughts and Maher of the 2020s is glaring.
It’s hard to overstate how impactful Maher’s show was as President George W. Bush took the country to war in the aftermath of 9/11. It was a time when anyone who spoke out against the President or the Iraq War was labeled a terrorist sympathizer, a traitor. And Maher, to his credit, had people on his program like Michael Moore, who rightfully questioned the administration and the justification for war.
Maher asked the tough questions at a time when it was wildly unpopular to break free of the groupthink — a sort of stupor the nation had collectively fallen into. He threaded the needle between humor and earnest, probing curiosity — a comedian who could actually do journalism.
He could be self-deprecating. He could express empathy. He still had a sense of humility and could admit when he didn’t know something, or when he’d been wrong about a topic. He was genuinely funny. Even in the darkest times, he made us laugh, and it felt like a release, a long-awaited exhale when we did.
All of that is gone.
Once, an unapologetic atheist who highlighted atrocities made in the names of all religions, Maher now wholly sides with Israel in the Israel-Palestinian war, portraying the millennia-old conflict as black and white — the good guys versus the bad guys. It’s hard to square that with the Maher of 20 years ago, who could’ve objectively looked at the war to see atrocities on both sides. He could’ve held two truths in his mind: That Hamas is a terrorist organization and committed horrific acts on October 7, which must be punished, and that Israel’s response was relentless, indiscriminate and arguably criminal.
That Maher is gone, too. This Maher routinely dismisses pro-Palestinian protesters as anti-Semitic, immature and ignorant. He nitpicks the definition of genocide.
The past few years, Maher has dedicated a lot of his show to rants about a woke bogeyman, elevating the lore and amplifying the fear.
He frequently smack talks Democrats, insisting there’s a big contingent in the party that espouses anarchy and seeks to abolish the police. But there is not a single candidate running for election this year whose platform includes defunding the police. Granted, there are TWO candidates who came under fire for previously shitposting about cops.
Maher may forget that he was once a fierce critic of militarizing local police departments. Not a peep about that now.
There are 23 U.S. House and Senate candidates who won their primaries based on a platform that includes abolishing ICE. But ICE is a whole other animal, and of course, Maher knows that.
Politicians on the Right, many of whom can’t define the distinctions between the economic models of Capitalism, Communism and Socialism, have followed the President’s lead, choosing a blanket term: communists! And Maher’s fallen in lockstep with them.
Outlets like the Associated Press, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org have all done investigations into communist sympathies among this season’s candidates. The Associated Press even interviewed Joe Sims, the co-chair of the Communist Party USA, who said there are no — none, zero — candidates for either congressional chamber who are communists, nor anyone who subscribes to its Marxist ideologies.
On the matter of Socialism, across the entire country, there are 10 Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed congressional candidates this midterm cycle. They represent just 2.3% of the Democrat’s House candidates. It would be interesting to put Bernie Sanders (an Independent and avowed Democratic Socialist) in front of Maher again — a politician he used to respect if not revere — and see if he suddenly remembers what it means to be a Democratic Socialist, or if he’d conflate it with communism and call Sanders a communist to his face.
On this week’s show, Maher strangely pressed guest Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) to renounce communism, like some modern-day Joe McCarthy, but with a TV show and a stoner podcast.
Meanwhile, Maher and his writers largely ignore the hugely consequential democracy-destabilizing things like voter suppression, the politicization of the Justice Department, the destruction of allied relationships around the world, the Trump administration’s egregious attack on the free speech and the free press, growing Christian Nationalist influence over the federal government, and the unbridled, rampant corruption committed by the President, his family and his cronies.
There is so much he could sink his teeth into. But what we get, instead, is another bit about Sydney Sweeney’s breasts and Maher advocating for the President’s vanity ballroom.
You may have noticed that, like the current President, Maher is easily seduced by flattery, celebrity and awards. For as long as he’s been on TV, he’s been a shameless name-dropper. Count how many times he refers to guests on his show as friends. He wants you to know he has access to celebrities and people in power. I’d argue that’s what he likes most about Trump — that he has access to the President of the United States, and he doesn’t want to lose it.
So, every show feels like appeasement now — like he’s playing to an audience of one.
Or maybe the “Real Time” viewership only comes from producing MAGA clickbait now? Have all the liberals, progressives — and those scary communists and socialists — tuned out?
I mourn the Bill Maher of 20 years ago. Back then, I paid for an HBO subscription when I “didn’t have two nickels to rub together,” because I valued the conversations he moderated, the thoughtfulness of the guest bookings. The show felt serious, timely — in fact, urgent — and impactful. I was such a fan of the show that my family would tease me that I had to be home at 10 p.m. on Friday nights to watch my “boyfriend’s” show, a standing weekly date.
It’s probably too wishful to think “Real Time” will return to that format — accessible, conversational, earnest, LIVE journalism. It suited Maher as a host, and it was exponentially more constructive for the audience. He might also ponder a tip from this old reporter: Consider your sources. When you give a guest like Karoline Leavitt that coveted first chair and your one-on-one attention, it signals to the audience that honesty, integrity and truth are no longer of consequence to you.
