Bill Maher: The price of free speech (clearly “offense”)

September 15, 2025 • 11:45 am

Here’s the latest “New Rules” interlude from Bill Maher’s Real Time show, called “New Rule: The price of free speech.” It’s a big hooray for the First Amendment, including Maher’s opposing (as I do) Trump’s ban on flag-burning. But he also call’s out the Left’s attempted curbs on free speech (I didn’t know that Lisa Cook, the Fed governor Trump’s trying to fire, herself tried to get a professor fired for being “less than rapturous about Martin Luther King Day).

He also calls out the quashing of free speech in the UK based on tweets—”hate tweets”—a kind of censorship that has spread to countries like Belgium and the Netherland.   Maher goes on to mention those who are critical of some gender activism, including J. K. Rowling and Dave Chapelle, but says he’d “go to the mat” for people’s right to say things that other people find offensive.  Even the Nazi-hailing pug dog that got its owner arrested makes an appearance.

It’s a pretty funny one, and though there’s not much new, it’s heartening to hear a stalwart defense of free speech from time to time. But the UK really needs to have its own version of the First Amendment.

28 thoughts on “Bill Maher: The price of free speech (clearly “offense”)”

  1. I normally agree with Maher, but he’s wrong in this case. Graham Linehan is NOT ugly about it. Telling women to punch a man in the balls if he threatens them is what most fathers tell their daughters. Saying he hates homophobes and misogynists is perfectly acceptable.

    Yes, Graham gets angry at times, but he has been standing beside women and girls for many years and all he gets is abuse and attacks from the ‘woke’ media. The people who reported him this time are men who feel they have a right to breach women’s boundaries and access women’s changing rooms and bathrooms and watch us undress.

    One of those men has openly threatened to kidnap JKR and other women, and he is still posting photographs of himself in women’s toilets but, as yet, the police still haven’t turned up at his door to arrest him.

    Graham is one of few men who has been very vocal against the mutilation of children. We owe him a great debt for the price he has paid for his activism.

    1. Well said. Thanks. Also GL didn’t add that if it’s not feasible to land a punch, kick him in the balls, as hard as possible. So his comment was quite mild.

      1. Exactly. It was explicitly stated as a last resort. Does Maher recommend that women allow men to assault us and don’t fight back? Surely not.

        I don’t remember Maher criticising Queen Camilla for kicking a man in the balls when he tried to attack her. But maybe I missed that episode. 🤦‍♀️🙄

        “she took off her shoe and kicked the predator in the testicles with her heel”.

        https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/other/i-kicked-him-with-my-heel-camilla-breaks-silence-on-a-significant-episode-from-her-adolescence/ar-AA1LN8fj

    2. I agree 100% with you, and also with Tom Steinberg’s comment on your comment: “Well said.”

      Many people who haven’t paid much attention to the doings of radical transgender activists (and still falsely believe that the fight for trans rights is just a replay of the gay rights struggle) do not comprehend the radicalism and the sheer nastyness of these activists (their slandering of their critics, the many lies, the death threats, the physical attacks on women, etc.).

      Linehan’s tweets, there was nothing wrong about them. And I fervently hope he wins his legal case against the Metropolitan police (which send 5 armed officers to arrest him like a criminal at Heathrow airport).

      1. 🎯

        They are actually trying to reverse the gay rights struggle. By trying to erase the definition of sex, transactivist are trying to erase same sex attraction. They insist that people should be attracted by gender, and not by sex.

        The men in dresses who are calling themselves ‘lesbian’ and demand that lesbians accept their ‘lady dicks’ are exactly the same homophobes as the misogynists of past years who insisted lesbians “just haven’t met the right man yet”.

        I don’t believe that trans ideology is compatible with being gay. Owen Jones is gay and a rabid trans supporter, but refuses to say whether he would date a woman who claims to be a man. I’m prepared to bet that he’s a TRA on the streets but a TERF in the sheets.

    3. Damn right Joolz – just consider the enormous personal cost Mr. L. paid for his brave stance against social manias: he lost his wife, health, wealth, most of his friends and lately his ability to get off a plane.
      Stand up for heroes like him.

      D.A.
      NYC

          1. I agree. There are already some people claiming that they didn’t really agree with gender ideology, they just went along with it. I think there are probably a lot of tweets and social media comments being deleted. They will hope that we don’t remember their names.

          2. High-profile traitors tend to get remembered whether they like it or not. B Arnold, V Quisling, P Pétain, ….

    4. A sentence from a BBC article from Sept. 3 on the Linehan situation piqued my interest the other day: ‘In his statement on Wednesday, (Met Commissioner) Sir Mark (Rawley) said the decision to arrest Linehan “was made within existing legislation – which dictates that a threat to punch someone from a protected group could be an offence.”‘

      Ironically, the member of the “protected group” in this context is the fellow with the balls and weeny, not the woman defending herself against him in a female-only space bathroom.

      (For context, recall that Linehan’s tweet was the following: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”)

      1. Men in dresses have more rights and protection under the law than women and girls. This is literally true in Scotland where a man in a dress is protected under the Hate Crime Bill, but a woman in the same dress isn’t.

      3. Mr. Linehan says he was trying to make a joke there, which he admits didn’t quite land, about the height difference between the woman in the loo and the hulking troon towering over her. One of the policewomen, trying to keep a straight face, said, “We’re not that small.”

        When you see that screenshot of the woman in Charlotte NC looking up, in the last seconds of her life, at the guy about to stab her to death, you can sort of get where Mr. Linehan was coming from.

    5. Yup, I don’t always agree with Linehan’s choice of words but Maher mischaracterises him in this piece. The three tweets that saw him arrested at Heathrow were not seriously offensive.

      Worth noting that all FIVE officers that arrested Linehan were armed – a highly unusual occurrence in the UK!

      1. I am certainly not defending the police, but it is normal for airport police to be armed. The only time I have seen a policeman carrying a weapon is at my local airport.

        Of course, as they were armed, sending 5 police is way over the top. Did they think one gun wouldn’t be enough to threaten him with?? 🤦‍♀️

    1. Good hands doesn’t know his burro from a burrow. The two declarations are diametric and as usual Trump ignores yet another law and Supreme Court ruling.

      1. I was being sarcastic but omitted the smiley 🙂

        Burning this representation of America may incite violence and riot.

        I don’t expect that in the US. But the threat of violence is not a good reason to outlaw an aspect of free expression. Burning the Koran might be more likely to incite violence, but that does not mean we should outlaw it.

        Didn’t someone burn the flag recently in protest of the presidential action?

        I’m interested in what SCOTUS would say about this, if it ever reaches them.

  4. Parliamentary governments can’t have a First Amendment because Parliament, not the Courts, is the supreme law of the land. It can pass any law it wants to, and repeal any law it wants to.* What it can’t do is run counter to constitutional conventions which are centuries old. (A “convention” by definition is something that you must obey but, being unwritten, you can’t be punished for violating.)

    There is no mechanism in Parliamentary law to write a restriction on its law-making ability that it could not itself undo by a simple Act of Parliament that passed with a simple majority of 50% of MPs plus one. We “need” an end to religion, too. Ain’t gonna get it. Especially in the current climate, the British Parliament is not going to beef up speech protections even with ordinary laws over the objections of Muslims and Leftist activists who hold the balance of power and the assassin’s veto. There is no constitutional knight waiting to ride to rescue Magna Carta. The British are on their own.

    (* The recent High Court decision that said men are men and women are women, even if they have gender recognition certificates, was merely an interpretation of existing English law. Nothing stops Parliament from passing a law that says anyone can be, legally, any sex s/he wants to be. One naturally hopes it won’t, but if it did, it would be good law, beyond the reach of the English Courts.)

    1. A law removing women’s sex-based rights would conflict with the Human Rights Act 1998 (and the European Convention on Human Rights that it incorporates into domestic UK legislation). Of course, the HRA itself could be explicitly amended to make it possible, but I don’t see any parliament being brave enough to try that. That said, IANAL.

  5. But the UK really needs to have its own version of the First Amendment.

    Regrettably this would be probably be done through an act of Parliament which would open up a rich seam of earnings for the legal profession to argue the finer points of the law. We would probably also end up with a regulator for Free Speech, OfSpeak, another layer of well paid bureaucrats.

    1. Yes, some additional office would be needed to coordinate the Ministry of Truth with the Ministry of Love.

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