Bill Maher’s latest “New Rule”

October 26, 2025 • 9:30 am

Bill Maher’s latest comedy/politics skit on Real Time is called “New Rule: Crazy in Gov”. In it, he takes the Republicans to the woodshed, which should dispel the stupid rumors that Maher is a right-winger because he found Trump a genial host during a dinner at the White House. (Those who go after Maher for this always omit the fact that he questioned Trump sharply during that dinner.)

The monologue begins with a general damnation of Trump, followed by a quote from Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s deranged press secretary: “The Democratic Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”  That statement more or less refutes itself.

Maher adds that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson called the “No Kings” demonstrations the “Hate America Rally”, composed of “Marxists, the socialists, the Antifa advocates, the the anarchists, and the pro-Hamas wing.” Finally, he mentions  the pro-Hitler texts of a bunch of Young Republicans.

Maher admits that “each side has its crazies,” but the Republican crazies have found their place in “elected government.” He adds,  “It should not be the case that the White House press spokesman sounds like worst Karen at Dollar General–but she does.”

After spanking conservatives like Scott Adams and Mike Cernovich, Maher adds some unhinged Republican quotes, and, as the bit ends, he finally gets up to speed:

“This insane caricature of the left as ruthless Communists about to force you into gulags, where you’ll sew our Lululemon yoga pants by forced labor—this has got to stop. . . . There’s no great replacement theory; and that 75 million that voted Democrat: they can’t all be drag queens. And one more thing—Democrats sometimes do things without George Soros telling us to.”

He stays away from the wokness of Democrats, though Maher does mentions that near the end. Didn’t didn’t Maher say that this wokeness might cost Democrats the last Presidential election?

It’s not one of his better bits, but it does get good at the end.

The guests are Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, Democratic political advisor Kate Bedingfield, and Republican political advisor and commentator Michael Steele.

19 thoughts on “Bill Maher’s latest “New Rule””

  1. Good post as usual. Just one comment. I don’t think this statement is deranged: “The Democratic Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” I think it is the beginning of the slippery slope where Trump declares any opposition group as domestic terrorists subject to FBI/DOJ/IRS etc investigation. Start with the “crazy” comments until they become a normalized part of the discourse, then designate the peripheral groups like ACT Blue as domestic terrorists, then finally the Dem Party itself. Sound crazy? Yeah, military attack helicopters in Chicago sounded crazy too. Until it wasn’t.

    1. Actually, I don’t think we should use the term “terrorist” at all in a legal context. The application of the term is too often subjective and likely to be subject to partisan viewpoints, as when Biden’s DOJ investigated Catholics as domestic terrorists. There is no actual crime that a terrorist commits that isn’t already a crime under the law. What people most often mean when they say terrorist is that they really don’t like the subject/action a lot.

    2. I would claim it is deranged because it’s just flat wrong. What percentage of Democrats are terrorists, undocumented immigrants, or violent criminals? I would say it’s quite low–nowhere near even half. Knowing that, her comment is indeed deranged, or, if you like, “unhinged.”

      1. True. My point was just that there’s a method to their madness. Make deranged comments, normalize them, get MAGA on board, then put the deranged policies into effect.

  2. I don’t believe that the Dems main constituencies are “illegal aliens and violent criminals”, but they certainly seem to be favored classes. I have, yet, to hear anyone explain why it is a valid interest to prevent the deportation of illegal aliens.

    1. “No Human is illegal!” That’s the valid interest.
      /sarc

      But it is the only rationale I ever hear advanced for obstructing efforts to deport illegal aliens. The Left say it ALL the time. What other purpose does a sanctuary city serve but to shield people from the law? (The corresponding sentiment in Canada is that it’s not “nice” to deport people who give us so much diversity. We just do an ad hoc “Rose and Valerie screaming from the gallery / Say he must go free” when the government looks about to deport someone.)

    2. It might be worth noting that Obama deported roughly 2.7 million illegal immigrants, and Biden deported roughly 1.1 million illegal immigrants in one presidential term, so it might be odd to imagine that Democrats try to prevent the deportation of illegal immigrants. As far as I understand the situation, Democrats have simply argued for due process in deportation proceedings, especially in cases in which the Trump administration has withdrawn various temporarily protected statuses.

      The wrinkle here is that Democrats are a large portion of the overall majority of Americans that favor an easy path to citizenship for illegal immigrants that have been in the U.S. for a decade or longer, work and pay taxes, and have no criminal record — ditto for DACA “recipients”. It does seem like the easiest and cheapest way to deal with illegal immigrants that have become regular, responsible, hard working neighbors and community members.

      1. There is a logical problem in retrospective post-hoc reasoning that ignores second-order effects in giving amnesty and citizenship to people who have evaded ICE for ten years and behaved themselves. I understand the sentiment, but a system that rewards people who manage to thwart it doesn’t inspire public confidence no matter what opinion-poll respondents think. Sometimes people just don’t know what they are talking about and their opinions shouldn’t affect policy.

        I always ask people who favour amnesty, plus the slack enforcement efforts it takes to accumulate the amnesty class, Do you want illegal aliens clocking their time to be your neighbours, their children crowding your schools, or do you just not want to lose your gardeners, day labourers, and DoorDash drivers who crowd into other neighbourhoods when they’re not performing a cheap service for you?

        1. “Do you want illegal aliens clocking their time to be your neighbours, their children crowding your schools, or do you just not want to lose your gardeners, day labourers, and DoorDash drivers who crowd into other neighbourhoods when they’re not performing a cheap service for you?”

          Illegal immigrants were my neighbors for years. My next-door neighbor ran a business that built and repaired gas stations in the Washington, D.C. area, and he hired a number of other illegal immigrants to work for him. They were the top of their profession, apparently.

          And my sister, who owned three restaurants in D.C. and Baltimore before retiring, had a number of illegal immigrants on her staff — they were the hardest working, and in several cases the most talented people.

          So I understand the sentiment of a majority of Americans who see such immigrants and wonder why not simply make them citizens? If you are concerned about some of them being a pool of cheap labor, citizenship might take care of that — they would be eligible for minimum wage and other benefits. When businesses around here — D.C. — are begging for workers in virtually every sector, relying on DOGE to fire long-term federal employees who will be willing to clean tables at Wendys is probably not a good strategy.

    3. DrBrydon : “I have, yet, to hear anyone explain why it is a valid interest to prevent the deportation of illegal aliens.”

      Because of the utility.

      Critical Immigration Theory is coming.

      Its development is using “Digital ID” as a ratchet to “🚩transform🚩 our daily lives” (Keir Starmer – emphasis added).

      One lesson from the fun times we had in atheism is I think from Sam Harris, namely, to (paraphrased) believe them when they tell us their religious beliefs.

      Same is true here for Leftist theory.

    4. Regarding “I have, yet, to hear anyone explain why it is a valid interest to prevent the deportation of illegal aliens.”

      Open borders are discussed here:

      Kelefa Sanneh: Untangling the Immigration Debate. New Yorker, October 24, 2016
      What do we owe people in other countries who would like to come to this one?
      https://archive.ph/98fo9

      Rutger Bregman: Utopia for realists: How we can build the ideal world. New York, Little, Brown and Co., 2017 [2014 in Dutch]
      Borders discriminate (pp.217-230, chapter 9)

      Bas van der Vossen and Jason Brennan: In Defense of Openness: Why Global Freedom Is the Humane Solution to Global Poverty. Oxford UP, 2018
      Ch.2 The moral and economic case for free immigration
      Ch.3 Economic objections to open borders
      Ch.4 Philosophical objections to open borders

      Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith: Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. First Second, 2019, 256 p.

    5. Maybe of interest:

      Michael Lind: Infinity Is the Wrong Number of Immigrants. Tablet, Sept 16, 2025
      Common-sense immigration policy begins with a willingness to look at hard data instead of propaganda from self-interested lobbyists
      https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/infinity-wrong-number-immigrants

      If we are to believe the propaganda of employers in tech and agriculture and hospitality and other fields, as well as universities, landlords and real-estate developers, ethnic advocacy NGOs, and the political party favored by immigrant voters, the Democrats, there should be no limits on the number of foreign nationals eligible to immigrate to the United States and become citizens. That’s because each of these special-interest groups benefits from mass immigration and has no reason ever to support any caps on the kind of immigration from which it profits.

      Tech companies want more H-1B indentured cubicle workers who are willing to work for less pay and are more subservient to their bosses than American citizens.
      Agribusiness companies want more indentured foreign serfs to labor in the fields, as an alternative to raising wages to attract American workers or investing in labor-saving machinery.

      Universities seek to expand their budgets and hire more administrators, instructors, and research assistants by enrolling more foreign students to pay their bills.
      Landlords and real-estate developers want immigrants to repopulate the big cities and the small towns that Americans are leaving.

      Ethnic advocacy groups want to increase their political influence by increasing the size of the immigrant ethnic diasporas they claim to represent.

      If you think of the United States as a nation-state, not a labor camp, then you do not have to be a xenophobic nativist to think that huge influxes of mostly impoverished and poorly educated people might polarize our politics and immiserate everyone except the very rich.

      Democratic Party strategists hope to create a permanent one-party Democratic majority by enlarging their coalition of college-educated whites and nonwhite voters with the addition of immigrants, who tend to prefer Democrats to Republicans and can vote once they obtain citizenship—and perhaps, in some cases, can vote illegally without being citizens (why else do Democrats oppose voter ID laws of the kinds common in other democracies?).

      Asked how many immigrants America needs, each of these selfish interest groups and industries naturally answers, “More!” If the annual number of legal immigrants were doubled tomorrow, the same institutions and interests would be wailing about shortages and demanding further increases. So it is no exaggeration to say that the ideal number of immigrants for many, if not the most, powerful institutions in American society is infinity.

  3. The conspiracy theory of a “Great Replacement Theory” is based on the 2000 United Nations Population Division publication Replacement Migration : Is it a Solution to Ageing Populations?

    One quote is

    “Critical issues to be addressed in those reassessments would include: [..] (e) policies and programmes relating to international migration, in particular replacement migration, and the integration of large numbers of recent migrants and their descendants.”

    Clearly, Replacement Migration is a conspiracy theory published by the United Nations Population Division which anyone can read about freely from their website :

    https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/unpd-egm_200010_un_2001_replacementmigration.pdf

    .. I mean “Great Replacement Theory” is the conspiracy, not “Replacement Migration”, which is a theory based on data but not a conspiracy because it’s the United Nations. It’s hard to keep straight –

    I blame my false consciousness as a one-dimensional “man”!

    1. It is indeed weird. In multiple countries where white European-origin people have been a majority, they are projected to become a minority in coming decades.

      For example, in the UK, it is now the case that 42% of kids in primary schools are children of post-1950 migrants (whereas in 1950 such schools were 99% British). Factoring in age profiles and birth rates, it is now pretty much inevitable that British people will become a minority in Britain within the next generation.

      And yet if you say this out loud the media will attach the label “Great Replacement Theory” and denounce it as a “far right” and “racist” “conspiracy theory”.

  4. “Maher admits that ‘each side has its crazies,’ but the Republican crazies have found their place in ‘elected government.’”

    Some valid points, but that “but” above is doing a lot of questionable work. Or are we saying it isn’t crazy for elected officials to support the castration of children, the housing of male offenders in female prisons, and a de facto open border and then to denounce as fascists and Nazis those who point out the craziness?

    I think it was Maher who a year or two ago said politics was no longer about left versus right but about “crazy” versus “not crazy.” I largely agree, but there are millions of otherwise respectable “not crazy” people on each side who both vote for and enable the crazy.

    1. Are those lefty crazies in elected government right now? How does the presence of lefty crazies in past or future government the presence of right wing crazies in the current one any better? Maher clearly isn’t saying that there never were any lefty crazies in government.

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