Bill Maher’s latest bit: Flirting with fascism

A lot of people came down on Bill Maher for his report about dining with Trump at the White House and, although Maher took Trump to task several times during that visit for the administration’s policies, he had the temerity to confess being surprised that Trump actually was gracious to him in person and even laughed.  For saying that Maher was demonized widely. Larry David joined in the pile-on in a satire in the NYT called “My dinner with Adolf“, a satirical parallel about dining with Hitler and finding him gracious.

Well, I wasn’t so amused by that parallel, for although I think Trump is a narcissistic loon who is on track to wreck the country, he is not equivalent to Hitler, and I detest the “Hitler parallel” that is so widespread these days.  The trope, of course, is that if you dislike someone and his actions, then every single thing that person does must be bad and he’s pretty much like Hitler.

This extremism and demonization is in fact the subject of a good book I’m reading now: Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind , which takes up Great Untruth #3 of Haidt and Lukianoff’s earlier bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Let me remind you of all three of those Untruths whose embrace by the young is, Haidt and Lukianoff argued, responsible for a lot of turmoil, divisiveness, and rancor on and off campus:

1.  What doesn’t kill you make you weaker
2.  Always trust your feelings
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people

We see #3 on both sides in American politics, including in the criticism of Maher, and all I can say is that by and large I embrace the arguments of Democrats, but I try hard not to see Republicans as evil, much less as a pack of Hitlers. Yes, of course there are some bad Republicans, but they’re not all Hitler equivalents.

Indeed, some of the NYT readers pushed back on David in a new collection of responses.

I had no doubt that after the dinner Maher would go back to dissing Trump on his show. And sure enough, he did in his latest “Real Time” comedy/opinion bit, called “New Rule: Flirting with Fascism”. Watch the 7.5-minute video below. As you see, Maher more or less calls Trump a liar, a violator of the Constitution, a flirter with authoritarianism and dictatorship, and an instigator of the January 6 insurrection. Not to mention the title of the bit. . .

Maher tells Democrats that they have to evolve a new strategy to win back seats and perhaps the White House, but he still favors trying to talk to the other side. He even mentions the crap he took for dining with Trump. Here’s the last bit that starts at 6:11:

“I’ve taken some shit from the looney Left for just reporting honestly how the President reacted in private when I criticized him to his face.   What I should have said is that he eats with his hands and that he showed me his collection of human ears pressed between the pages of Mein Kampf. . . . But I didn’t do that. I was honest about it, and that gives me standing to say to conservatives, ‘Now okay: you appreciated my honesty and balls, now I want to see your balls. . . . It’s not how I meant it to come out. . . . What I mean is ‘It’s your turn. You know things aren’t going well and the first hundred days has been, yes, a shitshow. Show me that you can be honest about that. Show me that you’re not just a MAGA cultist’.”

I would say that’s a pretty hard-headed criticism of Trump, and you won’t find harder criticism even in the NYT.  So let’s not have any demonization of Maher or flippant comparisons with Hitler here. If you want to emit the Hitler tropes, I’d advise you to abstain and reserve them for other websites I can point you to. In fact, I may make that the latest one of the Roolz.