The Intersection of Privilege and Cowardice
When media figures kowtow to fascism it's always the same story
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.
Now, Bill Maher has spoken truth to power about Trump before, and not too long ago. Take this heated exchange with Megyn Kelly, in which he’s pretty much dead on the mark about everything including his tone. This interview took place in late October, right before the election.
So what happened?
To explore that question I want to talk about Matt Taibbi for a moment. Hold your groans, however warranted, I swear I’ll put a moratorium on Taibbiposting after this for a period of time to be determined by me. But the phenomenon of someone who was once critical of Donald Trump suddenly falling into line as soon as the power dynamic shifts is coded to a very particular type of aging white narcissist.
Taibbi did his version of the switcheroo during the last Trump administration. Not that he was ever particularly horrified by Trump, himself, but in the lead-up to 2016 he did see the MAGA phenomenon as a kind of a comical but inevitable conclusion to the GOP’s escalating appeal to uneducated white voters. His Fear and Loathing style book of essays on the campaign was titled Insane Clown President.
Over time, though, it became apparent that the average Democrat wasn’t grateful enough for his work or offering enough uncritical praise. Like Maher, he needed to feel like the smartest guy in the room, and the quickest way to do that is to surround yourself with Republicans. Some time back, he decided he was voting for the insane clown the second time around and made a big explanatory statement about his new policy of not criticizing the GOP:
This manifesto, though, is all post-hoc. The truth is that Taibbi is able to switch teams so easily because he has nothing to lose. When the Trump Gestapo starts coming for rich white male celebrities they will literally be the only remaining demographic in America so at that point we’d be talking about the final days of Jonestown.
Where one candidate is promising to send tens of millions of Hispanic people to concentration camps, to roll back rights from LGBTQ communities, cut taxes for the rich even if it makes life more expensive for the poor, and slash health services particularly for women, a healthy straight white dude with a purple Substack checkmark (the highest category that indicates the writer earns, at the very least, half a million dollars a year) can afford to be a single issue voter where the single issue is social media moderation.
I think it’s important to be critical of Democrats as well, lest someone accuse me of too eagerly brushing aside Yuval Harari… whoever that is. Many liberals and leftists have been holding Jon Stewart’s feet to the fire for spending too much time covering the flaws in the Biden/Harris campaign and now apologising for not being one-sided enough, but to a degree I think that’s fine. Jon Stewart is a way, way better Bill Maher than Bill Maher.
But since the election, Matt Taibbi seems to have just kind of run out of things to talk about. He’s basically the dog who caught the car, and instead of his usual meat and potatoes work of criticizing the government he’s reduced to conservative media table scraps like trying to dig up more scandal about Biden’s mental health, ranting about AOC, defending the honour of Substack, and commenting on Australian politics.
I know that talking about privilege is the fastest way to ensure some people yeet my opinion straight into the woke dumpster, but is there really any other way to describe media figures at the top of the food chain whose biggest problem right now is trying to find something, anything, to talk about week after week during one of the most eventful four months in American history?
Then there’s Bill Maher. A self-described comedian who nevertheless sees his opinion as one of inflated importance, who portrays himself as better informed than any of his expert guests let alone his audience, thinks that it should change your opinion of the guy currently bagging and vanning college students and sending them to an El Salvador prison ostensibly for the rest of their lives to know that he laughs at jokes.
Actually it does alter my opinion of Trump to know that he laughs it Bill Maher’s jokes, but doesn’t improve it, if you know what I mean.
By the way, despite what Maher wants his audience to think, this is not the first time that he’s met Donald Trump. Trump used to be a Democrat. High society Democrats are largely all well acquainted with each other. Here’s a photo of them together at the 2004 Emmys.
He already knows what Trump is like in person because they used to hang out together. He fully expects us to believe that there are two different sides to Donald Trump—the one he shows to his broadcast media guests, lobbyists, and oligarchs in private, and the one he displays proudly the entire rest of the time—and he wants you to think it’s the latter that is fake. There are only two explanations for that, it’s either narcissism or bootlicking. I think it’s actually both: It’s the intersection of privilege and cowardice.
There’s a scene in the movie V For Vendetta in which a late night TV host is brutally killed by government agents after making fun of the authoritarian president on his show. I don’t think we’re exactly there yet, to be clear, but if I was doing that kind of show I think I would still be fairly nervous. Everyone who is in some kind of public facing position who has stood opposed to Trump needs to decide how to play this out going forward.
The absolute shittiest response is to completely abdicate your responsibility to the public and say that everything is just fine, the president can take a joke. That observation is utterly worthless—just like Bill Maher.
If you enjoyed this piece you might be interested to know that I’m writing a book about other wokey type stuff such as the toxic masculinity crisis in the internet age and how it has led to the current surge of reactionary culture and far-right populist politics across the western world. I’m going to be releasing chapters through this very newsletter approximately once a month, but the full chapters will be for paid subscribers only. Check it out here:
Ugh why can't maher just go away.