Bill Maher Isn’t the Only One Who Has Gone Over to the Dark Side

This is the second time I’m felt the need to single out Bill Maher for conspicuous bad-acting. (The first was about five years ago). Now that he’s been to the White House to kiss the King’s ass, he’s gone full Quisling.

Of course, he has been steadily drifting in that direction for decades. In recent months, Maher’s transformation has become alarming however, his steady corruption on plain view, as though the audience were a college of surgeons checking in each week to see the progress of buboes across his body. Some time back, I began to get the impression that someone was whispering into his ear, that he was on the take. The messaging on his show began to change, and not so subtly. “Independence” and “balance” are all well and good. But not where Fascism is concerned. A system where innocent citizens can be imprisoned and placed in concentration camps willy-nilly, and where the state silences all critics through intimidation and worse, is by definition Fascist in character. To collaborate with Fascists is to be a Fascist collaborator. It’s not difficult math.

Maher’s report that Trump doesn’t seem like a monster in person strikes me as identical to the observation that Hitler was kind to dogs, or that Ted Bundy came across as a really nice guy. SO THE HELL WHAT? How does that change ANYTHING? Trump has changed the world’s oldest democratic republic into a brutal autocracy. So that straw-man thing that Maher does where he impersonates the imaginary voices of his woke critics, you know, those scolds who are so tiresomely intolerant of the thugs who want to strip women and people of color of the right to vote (literally in motion right now) rings more than a little hollow. You know how you like to make fun of all those guys taking it up the ass for Trump, Bill Maher? Well, I’m not sure how you sell that joke any more now that you’ve done it yourself.

Maher’s a comedian, so who cares, right? Wrong. It matters a great deal. He and his ilk are cultural influencers. When those people cave, everyone else caves. This is why I have been pissed at all but a handful of our major cultural and political leaders, not just over the past three months but over the past ten years. As I said in my earlier post about the late-night hosts and this one about SNL, they have all been guilty of normalizing and trivializing this dark political movement since the very beginning of the first Trump administration. I find the laughter on the comedy shows nightmarish. Even Jon Stewart is guilty of it. He tries to steer his pieces to a serious place by the end of his rant, but it’s too late, the audience had already spent 20 minutes yucking it up over the end of life as we know it.

“Ya gotta laugh, right?” NO! You do NOT have to laugh! Not about this, anyway! Are you insane? “We gotta laugh, or else we’ll cry”. Well, then we’ll CRY about it! THAT’s the appropriate, sane reaction! Even if you’re a professional comedian! The appropriate reaction to all of this — comedians and politicians alike — from the very beginning has been to STOP whatever it is you’re doing, whatever you’ve spent your whole life doing, and call it out in all earnestness. Not with the empty fog of words. With deeds. You either derail the train or you ride along with it, and if you choose the latter, history will not forgive you. Trump’s State of the Union? No Democrat should have attended. The Oscars, the Tonys, the Golden Globes, the SNL 50th anniversary special? All should have been onslaughts about what is happening in the country right now. History is going to watch those shows like we watch footage of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. If you have a national platform and you are “keeping it light” to please producers, sponsors, or for that matter, audiences, in the present moment, you are doing it wrong

You’re afraid? You’ve received threats? You’re worried about your lives and your livelihoods? You do know that it’s going to get worse before it gets better, don’t you? Now is much easier than later is going to be. And is your fear that it’s too late? It’s never too late.