An 'Old-Fashioned Liberal' Scourge of the Woke

Democratic politicians "are not really crazy, by and large," he insists. "AOC is a little out there. Ilhan Omar, not my favorite.

There are some people, like Cori Bush, but they're still not nearly as crazy as the crazies on the rightLauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, people like that." He sums up the worldview of those two GOP congresswomen as follows: "I don't believe in democracy. I'm in a cult. I'll do what Trump says.

That's the No. 1 priority and that's the God I serve." Whom does he admire? Rep.

Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, who attributed Kamala Harris's election loss in part to the party's embrace of transgenderism. "I have two little girls," Mr.

Moulton told the New York Times on Nov. 7. "I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.

But as a Democrat I'm supposed to be afraid to say that."

Mr. Moulton's chief of staff resigned in protest. A local Democratic committee chairman in his district called him a Nazi "cooperator." Mr. Maher, animated with indignation, inches his way to the edge of his seat as he talks about the reaction to Mr. Moulton's remark. "Everything with these people has to be an opportunity for virtue signaling," Mr. Maher says. He sits back and mouths "WTF," then rolls his eyes and says, "Yes, of course there's variations in human sexuality.

We get that." But that doesn't mean "we should rewrite the anatomy and laws of human nature wholesale and think that every child born has an equal chance that they're in the wrong body. These are not hard calls to make." Mr. Maher, 68, is one of America's most prominent political comedians, host of HBO's weekly "Real Time With Bill Maher," which he calls "a show about ideas."

Mr. Maher describes himself as "an old-school liberal, just like my parents were." He distinguishes his old-school liberalism by saying that "wokeism in its current form is not an extension of liberalism. It is more often its opposite," even its "undoing."

But he still supports the Democratic Party, even if he tends to excoriate it more frequently-and avidlythan he does the Republicans.

Liberals in Hollywood and elsewhere say to him, " 'Oh, Bill, you're just picking on the fringe," " he says. "I say I'm not. I wish I was. That's old thinking. It used to be a fringe, and it migrated to places that are not fringe-like the staff of a Democratic congressman who is a perfectly good, oldschool liberal and is just saying something most common-sense people think." Mr. Maher says if he were Mr.

Moulton, he would have told the chief of staff, "Goodbye. Don't let the door hit you in the ass. You are exactly who this party needs to purge, you people who quit on me when I said this reasonable thing." That would "lose woke voters," but the failure of the rational Democratic center to push back against the "crazies" is what led to the party's drubbing by Donald Trump.

"It's sort of analogous to where I am," Mr. Maher says. "I've lost woke voters-woke audience members absolutely." But "I think I've gained more people in the middle.

And conservatives who are willing to hear points of view they don't agree with, but then understand where there's crazy on the left or wrong on the right-I will say it, and they respect that." I meet Mr. Maher in a wooden shack in his sprawling residential compound in Beverly Hills. The shack is where he has recorded his popular podcast, "Club Random With Bill Maher," since its inception in 2022.

The express purpose of our meeting is to talk about his Jan. 10 HBO comedy special, "Is Anyone Else Seeing This?" He says he made a point of recording it before an "ideologically mixed audience." "I go back and forth between things that make the right uncomfortable, and then something that makes the left uncomfortable."

He wants "the Trump people to laugh at the jokes about him because he is a preposterous figure." And he wants leftists to laugh at "woke nonsense because that is a gold mine for comedy. Anything that's ridiculous is a gold mine for comedy."

When people accuse him of mocking the left much more than he used to, Mr. Maher responds, "You're damn right I do, because you give me more material. I'm a comedian. I'm going to go where the gold is." "I think humor is one of the best avenues to get at the truth, maybe the best, especially in politics," he says. "When someone laughs, it is involuntary. So you can make the audience admit that they agree with you even if they really don't want to." But the woke don't always laugh. "This is one of the issues I have with the left.

They can't stand to have to endure a moment of hearing something they don't already agree with. Not that the right doesn't do it, too, but the left does it worse." He also raises hackles on the left by inviting conservative guests, like Ann Coulter, on his show. "I had liberal friends who just couldn't stand that. Just think about what this is"-he pauses for dramatic effect-"that's people who hate me for who I won't hate." He repeats the line in a flourish of befuddlement: "People who hate me for who I won't hate."

Why do people on the left find it impossible to be congenial toward those they disagree with? "It's in their psychological profile," Mr. Maher says. "They just have this need for virtue signaling, and to have their friends-and I guess everybody on social media-think of them as the good people. 'We're the good people.

We know who's good. And it's us." "It's easy "to stand next to Donald Trump and say that. Next to him they definitely are."

Mr. Maher lists a few of the things he deplores about the former and future president: allegations of sexual impropriety, disparaging the handicapped and John McCain, "trying to stay in power when he lost an election."

But the left scorns "everyone who votes for Trump" or associates with conservatives.

"I've lost friends because I've had somebody like Bill Barr or Ted Cruz on the show." After Mr. Barr appeared in 2023, Mr. Maher got a "scathing message" from a friend, asking why the host didn't "immediately punch him in the nose." The host throws his hands up in exasperation: "Bill Barr said forthrightly, 'Trump lost.' And that's what I call an as-good-as-it-gets Republican. Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger. Republicans with backbone. Mitch McConnell.

If you're not going to talk to them, to Chris Christie..." He trails off.

"You don't want to alienate them.

But the left is just too full of purists. It's not a sign of great intellectual achievement. It's a sign of insecurity." Mr. Maher claims to be an equal-opportunity offender, and he has the scars to prove it. Days after 9/11, the conservative writer Dinesh D'Souza appeared on his ABC show, "Politically Incorrect," and took issue with the common claim that the suicide hijackers were cowards.

"None of them backed out," he said. "These are warriors." Mr. Maher agreed: "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.

That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it--not cowardly. You're right." Outrage ensued, and ABC declined to renew his contract in 2002.

Mr. Maher says he's grateful to HBO for allowing him freedom: "I can attack the right, the left, everything, and that's very rare today." He can even "attack religion." His view of that topic is summed up in the title of his 2008 documentary, "Religulous." I ask if he has had any second thoughts about religion given that it has been a bulwark against wokeness. "Of course not," he says. "But some of them are cooler than others. Some of them are less fundamentalist, less violent, and less about the afterlife. I won't say which ones.

Let's just leave it vague. I think we know who they are." Similarly, he says there's no way he's changing parties. "Many Republicans say, 'Maybe we could get Bill Maher.' No, you can't. What you can get is Bill Maher being honest about the left. I'm not going to join your team that doesn't believe in democracy."

Still, he allows that there are voters who are "not particularly enamored with Trump, not blind to his many flaws, but they just feel that the crazy on the left is somehow worse. I don't agree with them, but I get it. I don't hate them for voting for him."

Is Mr. Maher looking forward to the next four years? He says his first reaction when Mr. Trump was re-elected was a weary one: "I don't want to do this because I've done all the jokes and I did them before anybody. He's a con man, a mafia boss. Trump is going to Trump. There's nothing new to say." But then he says he isn't going to "pre-hate.

I'm not doing the first term again, where we all get apoplectic about every crazy thing he does. When he blows up the world, call me." Besides, Mr. Maher said, this time around "he's got different people around him. Some of them I like." He seems genuinely excited by the prospect of "the band of reformers that Trump has put together. It's like a Marvel movie.

This gang is coming to shake things up. As a viewer, I am interested to see what this is. It's not like America doesn't need shaking up. We are a sclerotic, constipated country, and it just keeps slowly getting worse." "I'm a big America booster," Mr.

Maher continues. "One of my problems with the younger generation is they have no idea, no perspective. Of course, if they've gone to elite universities, i.e., a-factories, they've been indoctrinated into this idea that they live in the worst country in the world at the worst time in history, when actually they live in, with all our flaws, still probably the best, with definitely indisputably the best time in history."

'I like America. America does not need a revolution." What it needs is "a colonic.

Would Trump be the man I chose first to administer it? No, but I'd like to see what he and Elon Musk are going to do." Mr. Maher has "loved some of the things that Musk has said." He offers the example of Mr. Musk's take on the F-35 fighter jet, which the outspoken entrepreneur described as "obsolete" in "the age of drones."

Mr. Maher says "we do need some of that thinking, and so maybe I'm going to love some of this." The Republicans, he believes, will run rings around the Democratic Party for as long as the latter fails to "unconvince itself that it is this misunderstood vehicle for what people really want. They often say, when they lose elections, 'We didn't get our message out.' Yes you did. They just didn't like it.

You got it out loud and clear." He doesn't buy the argument that Ms. Harris lost because of the brevity of her campaign. "People say she only had a hundred days.

It didn't matter. You get your message out in five. Other countries have elections that take two weeks."

"You had too much time," he says, as if addressing her. "You lost a crazy contest to an actual crazy person. Congratulations."