YouTube hasn’t yielded Bill Maher’s comedy segment from his latest “Real Time” show, but I found something nearly as good: his conversation this week with the ladies of “The View”. There are two parts, which I put in reverse order, but both show that Maher’s appeal isn’t just from his (or his assistants’) comedy scripts, but also a general eloquence and thoughtfulness. There’s no script here; he just argues and discusses wokeness, the Presidential candidates, and the war in Gaza with five outspoken women.
I found the second part of Maher’s appearance (10 minutes) more interesting, and so put it first part (9.5 minutes). Watch in reverse order if you want to see the whole thing. All of it’s good.
What happened to Jon Stewart?
If you look at the 2 clips one of the things that stands out is Sunny Hostin, second from the right.
Specifically, her stone-face. Hostin loves to prime the resentment pump at every turn. She knows that she doesn’t have an easy in with Maher. Both share a good deal politically, but Hostin is captivated by identity politics. Hence her question to Maher about “wokeness”….for which he is too sharp and smart to fall for the bait.
BTW, Hostin is descended from slave owners on PBS’s Finding Your Roots.
+1
Utterly annoying human specimen.
My wife pointed out that in the last seconds of the show Sunny Hostin has a pen in hand, and she’s pushing her copy of Maher’s book toward him so that he could sign it. Curious.
I recall the clip when they had Cameron Hughes on the show and she attacked him quite viciously. Wouldn’t really listen to a word he said other than looking for another angle of attack and an opportunity for self-righteous posturing. Like Maher, Hughes remained calm, even under ridiculous and unfair provocation. In this case I was surprised that Maher even got her to concede that Hamas should be destroyed.
Maher’s division of the current political spectrum into four essential bands rather than just “left” and “right” is spot on and something I wish he had been allowed to discuss in a bit more detail. But Hostin didn’t want to concede that there even is a far left and the others mostly just skipped by it.
*Don’t you mean Coleman Hughes?
Oops. You are correct. Sorry, figurative slip of the tongue.
👍🏼
That was very interesting – thanks for posting those videos!
I saw these and was impressed with how Maher calmly argued his positions, probably exasperating his hosts!
And listened. He drives me nuts on his own show for interrupting but here he let people finish even when it was annoying.
This week was a repeat. That is why there is no new editorial.
Stewart has fully capitulated to critical race theory. Audience capture. He famously (or infamously) called Andrew Sullivan a racist and a “motherfucker” on his now cancelled Apple show in what amounted to an intellectual ambush, on a program dealing with the “problem of whiteness.” Maher on the other hand, is willing to lose parts of his audience rather than cater to the mob
+1
Stewart seems to be aiming for a younger audience and I think he’s deathly afraid of offending them. He also seems to have been sucked in to the reprehensible and contradictory view that you’re not liberal unless you’re progressive. It’s disappointing and ultimately counterproductive. But even so, I think he still has his moments.
Here is a woman, not from The View, who is quite unimpressed by Bill Maher.
Edit: Oops – didn’t mean to embed it. This should have fixed it.
Yes, she found some things where Maher got it wrong. Yes, Hillary did say that Trump had stolen the election from her. But note that Hillary didn’t attack the Capitol.
But after the stuff with Maher, she brings on the author of ”Fossil Future” and goes into full-swing right-wing anthropic-global-warming-is-a-scam mode.