Speaker 1: We talked a couple of weeks ago about this kind of sad downfall of Bill Maher,
a guy who I generally used to like and still think has valuable insights on some issues. I have a
really great illustration that was sent to me by a viewer yesterday about where Bill Maher really
has gone off the rails. And this is a clip from an interview he just did with Jake TAPPER from
CNN. Bill Maher has been sort of anti-woke in that he's been arguing against wokeness and saying that
this aspect of the left is bad. And, you know, to the extent that the left goes too far with
identity politics or whatever the case may be, you can find no bigger critic than me when I find an
element of the left that I don't like, I call it out. And there are sometimes some consequences to
it. Some in my audience don't like me doing it, but I try to make those call outs proportional
to how significant these things are within the left fight. Bill Maher is asked what is woke and
he spits out a word salad. It's like a chop chop. It's like a confetti salad. The ones where you get
almost like little tiny bits. It makes no sense. He says things that aren't true, and this clip
is really a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong with Bill Maher. Take a
look at this and wokeness. Speaker 2: Like, how do
you define wokeness? Because I hear. Speaker 3: People use the term all the
time and it means something different. Speaker 2: To everybody. Well, again,
I think it's this collection of ideas that are not building on liberalism, but very often undoing it.
I mean, five years ago, Abraham Lincoln was not a controversial figure among liberals. We liked him.
Now they take his name off schools and tear down his statues.
Speaker 1: Okay. Neither of those things are happening. So Bill Maher is asked to define
woke and he says it's anti liberal stuff like the left taking down statues of Abe Lincoln and
renaming schools named after Abe Lincoln. I spent a while researching whether those
things were happening. There is one example of an Abe Lincoln statue that was taken down,
and it was a really weird statue in Boston where there was like a black man weeping at the feet of
Abraham Lincoln. And it's a really weird vibe. Okay. It's been a controversial statue for a
while. It doesn't actually have anything to do with the recent statue debate. And it was removed
and it was a really weird statue. But statues of Abe Lincoln are not being removed. There is no
effort to remove Abe Lincoln statues. You might be able to find one person who went to some town hall
meeting and said we should get rid of enabling and such, but there's no actual effort going on
to remove them. They're not being removed. There's this one weird one with a black man weeping at the
feet of Abe Lincoln. That's it. Just doesn't really make sense in 2023. So that's very
deceptive. And the number two, Abe Lincoln's name is being removed from schools. I have not found a
single example of Abe Lincoln's name being removed from schools. What I found was a story from
January of 2021 where San Francisco said, we might rename like all the schools from the era during
which there was slavery, and that included one named after Lincoln. It didn't happen. They kept
the name. So one school might have been renamed and it wasn't so. So far. His two examples of what
wokeness is are things that are not happening. Speaker 2: Lincoln isn't good enough for you,
You know, 510 years ago I bedrock liberalism was. We are striving to be a colorblind society where
we don't see race. Of course we see it, but it doesn't matter. That's not what woke is.
Woke is something very different. It's it's identity part. It's we see it all the time.
It's always the most important thing. Speaker 1: Okay. So listen, as far as
identity politics goes, I'm critical of identity politics on the left, but the identity politics
is overwhelmingly on the right. Does it exist on the left? Sure. I've called it out. For example,
when the Women's March said that Jewish women are not intersectional enough to
be on the leadership because they're really just privileged white women,
I thought that that was the left doing identity politics in a way that is disgusting and
destructive. And I called it out. When these things happen, I call them out. But look at
the identity politics happening on the left. Christians are oppressed, white people are
oppressed. Nikki Haley, why are you running? Well, I'm not going to tell you anything I disagree with
Trump on. But I'm younger, I'm a woman and I'm Indian. That's that's identity politics. And I
don't hear any of these anti-woke leftists calling it out. I would respect Bill Maher way more if he
said, I'm against identity politics anywhere I see it. And here's a couple of examples of it.
On the left, it's always vaguely said the woke identity politics. Give us a specific
examples and I will be right there with you in criticizing them. But you've got to point
out that the identity politics cudgel is being used by the right when the identity politics is
overwhelmingly coming from them. I would like to I would like to see Bill Maher take that approach as
opposed to this word salad definition of woke. Speaker 2: I don't think that's liberalism. I
mean, I could mention so many issues like that. I remember doing that show on HBO,
Comic Relief for the Homeless, and the idea then again among liberals, I thought was,
you know, for the sake of compassion, can we get these people off the street? So they remember.
Speaker 1: The question was what is woke. Speaker 2: A roof over their heads? And
now it's like, how dare you try to move the homeless? This is where they live. Again, you
change the definitions and then you say, I'm more conservative. I believe what I've always believed.
Speaker 1: Now that's true. Okay. So as I pointed out a couple of weeks ago.
A lot of the Bill Maher stuff, like the kind of anti-vax and, you know, things like this,
it's not actually new. The difference is that the environment has become a more welcoming one
for these ideas of Bill Moyers. And so they're getting more attention. But Bill Maher has been
doing a lot of this routine for a very long time. So check out my video on YouTube called They Don't
Even Know What Wolk Means. I explain more about this inability to define Wolk, but now Bill Maher
asks for a definition, mentions two things about Abe Lincoln that aren't true, and then vaguely
mentions identity politics and a comedy special that he once did. Not hugely compelling stuff.