🔒 The Intersection of Privilege and Cowardice

With so much to be angry about right now this might seem petty, but one of the things I’m angriest about might be Bill Maher.

 I know, I know. Any energy spent thinking about Bill Maher, let alone being upset about him, is energy wasted. I’ve written about him once before, if only to ask why exactly he exists. He’s barely a comedian and although he thinks he’s the smartest person in any given room he still finds a way to be wrong about everything even when he’s right. I’ve never heard anyone say they’re a Bill Maher fan.

 Yet somehow he persists, and apparently there are people who are entertained by him, and not just the kind of entertainment you get from someone being smacked repeatedly in the balls. I used to think “maybe it’s old people who watch him,” but now I’m old too, so I’m stumped, unless his audience is people who are super old and remember him from Murder, She Wrote.

But yeah, he made me mad. Congratulations for getting under my skin, America’s Lame Uncle. After years of some of fierce opposition to Donald Trump—the only kind of correct he’s ever been, politically or otherwise—he finally decided it was time to bury the hatchet. At the dumbest time possible, for the stupidest reason possible.

 In short, Trump invited him to dinner at the White House and was super polite to him. And laughed at his jokes.

 Here’s the entire excruciating segment:

People will, as they have before, point out to me that Bill Maher’s credentials as a liberal strain the outer bounds of what we’re willing to accept. He might be as close as you’ll get to a dictionary centrist, one whose lean is better described as contrarian than either left or right. He doesn’t like to agree with people. Agreeing with someone, after all, would give the illusion that they’re as smart as he is.

 What Maher has never been is a Trump guy. Until now, that is. He’s been lacerating Trump far longer than Trump has been in elected office—the feud has gone back at least as far as the Obama years in which Trump led the so-called “birther” movement (a racist conspiracy theory that alleged Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States) and he sued Maher for millions over a joke Maher made that Trump couldn’t prove one of his parents wasn’t an orangutan.

 The tone didn’t really shift for ten years. Maher thought Trump was brainless, arrogant, and incompetent. Trump thought the exact same thing about Maher. To be fair, they were both right. Things changed only this year, when Maher went strangely quiet about Trump until early April when he announced he’d been invited to the White House and they are friends now.

 Moreover, that anyone who still really hates Trump needs to grow up and try being more positive. 

Now, listen. I don’t think that the reality of what’s happening in the White House requires everybody to throw the kill switch on their humour circuits and put themselves on permanent cardiovascular alert for the next four years. Doomers are exhausting and I don’t begrudge anybody who either doesn’t talk politics or takes a light approach to it. I envy them. We need time off. We need comedians right now.

 But you need to pick your goddamn lane.

 You can either be somebody who makes fun of the absurdities, like how Trump keeps lying about his weight and his health, or how RFK had a parasitic worm in his brain, or Elon Musk’s baffling lies about how good he is at video games… you know, the real clown stuff. I’m fine with that.

 Or else you can lecture people about Trump. And if you’re going to lecture people then you need to do it in the context of the fact that he’s disappearing people to concentration camps. That he is sincerely threatening to do it to tens of millions of people including US citizens. That he is openly ignoring the Supreme Court. That he is attempting to shut down universities. That he is attempting to shut down law firms. That he is attempting to shut down the arts. That he’s using economic warfare to try to force some kind of cultural revolution. That he is threatening war against several countries, some of whom are NATO members, and that he will ally with Russia against them if they defy him.

 You don’t get to leave that stuff out and tell us he has a nice fucking smile and that he privately takes the orange spray tan jokes much better than he lets on. You don’t get to tell us that these things need to change our opinions about him.

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