Category: politics

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.

Where are celebrations from Democrats in Congress of the hostages’ return?

October 14, 2025 • 11:20 am

Yesterday I spent a while looking on Twitter for various Democrats in Congress celebrating the return of the hostages to Israel, or even the return of Palestinian prisoners to Gaza. I looked at all the members of the Squad, but (with one exception) no dice, Of course you wouldn’t expect to see Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib celebrating, because if you celebrate the return of Palestinians to Gaza, you’d have to celebrate the return of the hostages to Israel. But AOC? She wants to be a Senator, or even President, but. . . crickets, and she has two “X” accounts.

Surely Chuck Schumer would have a word for the hostages, right? After all, he’s Jewish. But no—bupkes.

All the Democrats seem to be busy on Twitter blaming the shutdown on Trump.  And that’s fine, but couldn’t they celebrate the happiness of having hostages held for two years by Hamas coming home? My theory, which is mine, is that doing that would be giving implicit credit to Trump, and that just won’t do in today’s political climate.

Readers may help by doing their own searches, and if you find a Democrat in the House or Senate celebrating the hostage return, put their names and a link below (I haven’t checked Fetterman, but I’m sure he said something).

Actually, Ayanna Presley, a member of The Squad, did say something, though she also celebrated the return of the 2000 Palestinian prisoners, some of which are murderers and terrorists. But then again, she’d more or less have to:

Now this was just a short search, and I’m SURE some Democrats are celebrating the hostage return, but given the decreasing approbation for Israel in the U.S., and the fact that one could impute the latest cease-fire agreement partly to Trump, I didn’t see what I expected.  Any person of good will should have at least a modicum of joy for what happened the other day.  Let me know who you expected to be happy about this but didn’t say squat.

I didn’t look at Republican tweets; I just assumed that they’d say more about the hostage return than the Democrats. After all, they’re in the same party as Trump.

Coleman Hughes: an objective take on slavery

October 12, 2025 • 11:15 am

Coleman Hughes, a rising star in journalism (he’s only 29 years old), has been snapped up by The Free Press, where he writes regularly.  He’s a clear and eloquent writer, and, more important, he seems a lot more objective than people who write what are essentially opinion pieces in the MSM.  And today we have one of those pieces: an analysis of why both left and right are distorting the history and effects of slavery. (In that respect it’s like the inimical effects of left and right on science.) While Trump is trying to remove any mention of the inimical effects of slavery from American life, “progressives” blame the residual effects of slavery on nearly all aspects of America, maintaining that the history of America should begin in 1619, and engaging in antiwhite racism as instantiated by an offensive poster in the Smithsonian created by wokies long before Trump (see below).  Further, the left ignores the contributions of African blacks and Arabs, which were considerable, to the slave trade, as well as the fact that Native Americans in the SE also had slaves, with five such tribes taking the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War.

It will do you good to read this article, which you can do by clicking on it below.  (You’ll need a subscription to the FP, as their articles can’t be archived.)

Some excerpts, with Hughes beginning with The Problem:

If you’ve been following American politics for the past five years, you may have noticed an unhealthy pattern: The left, which controls most cultural institutions, uses soft power to shape them in an ever more progressive direction. The right, which controls few cultural institutions but does possess political power, passes vague and heavy-handed policies intended to undo the left’s handiwork (and then some).

Core to this pattern is the fact that the left tends to view the institutions it controls as politically neutral when, in fact, they are stamped throughout with their own sacred values. The right, in turn, tends to see their scorched-earth responses as justified by a sense of powerlessness over the leftward direction of American culture.

Perhaps nowhere has this pattern been more perfectly illustrated than in the fight over depictions of slavery in our national museums.

The fight began when President Donald Trump issued the executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” on March 27. The executive order was intended to fight the “corrosive ideology” that I call “neoracism” in my book—an ideological outgrowth of critical race theory that demonizes whiteness, elevates blackness, and argues that America is white supremacist in its very DNA.

As the order explained, this ideology “seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light,” and reconstructs America’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”

But blame devolves on the left, too:

Starting about a decade ago, neoracism began to sweep through America’s elite institutions. As I explained in a recent essay, journalistic outlets began to blame just about everything on the legacy of slavery, including Excel spreadsheets, gynecology, tipping, mass incarceration, the Second Amendment, prison labor, Jack Daniel’s whiskey, fine dining, abortion bans, coffee, the word cakewalk, and the obesity crisis.

You may remember this poster that the Smithsonian put up; I wrote about it at the time (2020). After a huge public backlash, the Smithsonian removed it.  It’s racist—and offended both blacks and whites. Fortunately, you can still see the extent of virtue-flaunting that followed the death of George Floyd. Get a load of this; my earlier post, linked above, gives some details:

The Smithsonian is pretty woke (go look at its Human Evolution exhibit), and this is one reason Trump singled it out—in a way that Hughes thinks is probably illegal:

One of the many things Trump has done to fight this strategy is direct the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents to “prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy.”

It does not take a linguist to understand that this order is vaguely worded and bound to produce confusion—one man’s “divisive” ideology is another man’s common sense. Nor does it take a constitutional expert to understand that Trump does not have the authority to force the Smithsonian to do anything. By law, the Smithsonian is run by a Board of Regents, and that board is composed of the vice president, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, three senators appointed by the president pro tempore of the Senate, three House representatives appointed by the Speaker of the House, and nine citizens appointed by a joint resolution of Congress. In other words, Trump can’t just take a wrecking ball to the institution without violating the separation of powers and the rule of law.

Unfortunately for Trump, the law requires–and rightly so–displays at the Smithsonian about the history of slavery in America, and this was done in 2003, when Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate as well as the Presidency:

By law, the museum must have “permanent and temporary exhibits documenting the history of slavery in America” as well as other aspects of African American history. This was all a bipartisan effort—not an example of the left forcing something down the right’s throat. If Republicans had a problem with it, they could’ve thwarted it at the time.

But Hughes, as did other black intellectuals, points out issues with the Smithsonian’s depiction of slavery:

This is not to say the Smithsonian’s slavery exhibit is without flaws. As John McWhorter pointed out in The New York Times earlier this year, the exhibit could have done more to highlight African participation in the transatlantic slave trade. He is echoing an argument made some 15 years ago by Henry Louis Gates Jr., who wrote an infamous New York Times op-ed called “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game.” In it, Gates pointed out that, for whatever reason, Africans are the one group of people that have mysteriously escaped history’s harsh eye despite being enthusiastic participants in the transatlantic slave trade.

“The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred,” he wrote.

The backlash to the op-ed was fierce. As Gates put it: “People wanted to kill me, man.”

In the end, what is Hughes’s point? Simply this: he wants a “compromise” position that emphasizes the horrors of slavery but also facts that don’t fit the narrative, like Native American ownership of slaves. In other words, he wants the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth:

The Trump administration has accurately diagnosed a problem area in American culture. But its attempt to fix it should not focus on minimizing the ugly facts of American slavery. Instead, it should focus on broadening the scope of facts that we allow into the conversation. In this way, Americans can have a more complete, more accurate, and less racially divisive picture of our own history—without compromising the truth.

Why it’s not stupid to criticize aspects of leftist ideology that pollute science

October 12, 2025 • 9:30 am

I’m getting tired of virtue-flaunting miscreants who yammer about our anthology The War on Science (Lawrence Krauss, ed.). Their beef?  By and large, the 32 chapters by 39 authors discuss the negative effects of woke ideology on science, effects that come largely from inside science: scientists themselves, journals, publishers, university programs, and so on.  And, of course, nearly all these people are on the left, with many being authoritarian “progressives.” And it just won’t do to criticize science from the left. Don’t you know that Trump, who is bullying many universities and threatening to withdraw science funding unless they meet his agenda, is a far greater danger to science than is the left? Ergo, the left should simply shut up, or use its energies attacking Trump.

As if we haven’t already! Nearly all the authors are liberals who freely admit the damage Trump is doing to science. But we also argue that the “progressive” wing of our ideology is damaging science, and in a way that will last a long time. Further, the book was organized before Trump began his series of orders and bullying of colleges.  But never mind, the critics are, in effect, going after us because, after all only one side at a time should be criticized.  And a lot of people who criticized the book hadn’t even read it: they were going after it based solely on the title and the table of contents, saying that the book is “right wing.” ”

Well, that’s palpably stupid.  And it’s hypcritical. Did you hear these critics raising hell when Obama and Biden threatened to punish colleges that didn’t let trans-identified men compete in women’s sports, or, especially, when these Democrats tried to enforce the clearly unfair rules used by colleges under title IX in adjudicating cases of sexual harassment or assault? Nope, not much noise came from the “progressives”. That’s because the improvement in those standards were mandated by Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Secretary of Education, and we can never, ever admit that anybody in a Trump administration did anything good. Such is the divisiveness in American politics, in which each side totally demonizes the other.

But I digress, for one of my readers has made the points above far more eloquently than I could. You may have read this reader’s arguments already, but I thought they deserved a standalone post.  It involves a pair of comments on a recent post containing the video “A panel of authors from the anthology ‘The War on Science”,  Sure enough, Paul Torek weighed in with a comment like the ones I mention above:

OK, I’m not trained in military strategy. But it seems to me that when an army comes after your science funding with tanks and jets, you don’t worry too much about a few boy scouts with pea shooters coming from the opposite direction. Even if they’ve got girl scouts and nonbinary scouts too. Priorities do matter.

Here, it seems, Torek seems to mean that we shouldn’t have been worrying about what the woke left was doing to science instead of worrying about Trump. (Alternatively, the authors could be interpreted as the ones with pea shooters.) Either way, I thought it was misguided, but even misguided comments get posted if they advance a discussion.

And this was followed by an eloquent response to Torek from one “Doug”:

I am trained in military strategy, but the field isn’t essential to grasp the point. I would suggest that insurgency can pose a far more difficult fight than an external adversary—no matter how well the latter is armed. It’s rather unpleasant to fight your neighbor, your family, your colleagues, your [former] friends. Who can you trust? Who will betray you? Nor is it clear how to do so without destroying the very things and places you seek to defend. But rallying against those despised people outside your tribe is rather simple. And framing the current war in terms of former wars is an ever-present temptation and often a road to defeat.

The battle for academia is on two fronts. There is no shortage of either courage or effort in countering Trump—nor is there a lack of weapons to do so. But the internal attacks on science, merit, and academic freedom are insidious and began long before Trump became part of the national political conversation—and they will continue when he is gone. You belittle that threat. Fair enough. I’ll let your colleagues either side with you, wring their hands, or disagree. But universities aren’t country clubs for their current inhabitants. Those of us outside who value what they once were—and hope they can be again—also get a vote. We know you want to fight Trump. Do you have any interest in fighting the illiberal elements in your own committees, departments, and administration? What’s your plan to succeed?

Academia has not corrected itself over the last decade. Why? Self-satisfaction? Confusion? Lack of courage? The latter would make it difficult to distinguish friend from foe, hampering reform. Your illiberal insurgents push on, gaining significant ground. Your “peashooters” dictate the culture and rules across much of elite academia—the proving ground for future national leadership. They control many professional associations, academic publishers, credentialing agencies, and the media. An influential swath of the legal profession is theirs. And they largely control one major political party, populated with “leaders” who brook little internal dissent and offer none. Concomitant with the advance of your peashooting brigade is an increased willingness to tolerate violence, to silence speech with which one disagrees, to ruin the lives and reputations of those who dissent to the new and everchanging rules for polite society. Ask Carole Hooven and Joshua Katz why they cried so much from being pelted with mere peas.

It is now entirely unclear whether lost ground in academia can be recaptured without substantial outside assistance. Many of us would greatly prefer an Administration of either party that empowers academic reformers, but who are the mythical people in the universities who would welcome the assistance of the much-hated Right wing? Where are the mythical Democrats in national leadership who would insist on reform? Unfortunately, those now in federal power decided that firebombing is to be preferred over precision strikes. And I must admit, despite the destruction, I am not confident that they are wrong. What I am confident of is that the battle will not be waged at all should the insurgents get a final supportive push from a new Democratic administration. Oh, certainly, you would retain your vaunted academic freedom—in much the same way that wings are legs, too.

Another way to put it is that it is silly to worry about an antibiotic-treatable infection, no matter how unpleasant, if you have a cancer metastasizing within. But one of these is easier to ignore—especially if the patient is blind to the symptoms, avoids personal pain, and has no interest in being screened.

I’ll add “QED”.

Bill Maher’s New Rules

October 4, 2025 • 11:30 am

Bill Maher is on a winning streak with his 7-8-minute politics and comedy bits on his “Real Time” show. Here’s the one from yesterday, called “New Rule: Long Division”: This one’s about gender (he means “sex”), with Maher saying “Until the Democrats come to grips with that, they’ve not going to have much success winning elections.” But the two parties also divide by sex, with young men preferring Trump by a big margin, and young women preferring Kamala by equally large numbers. This leads to a difficulty in dating (if you’re a Democrat, would you have a girlfriend who was Republican, or vice versa?, though James Carville and Mary Matalin seem to have worked it out).

Maher’s message: women are doing better than men now, and, among Democrats, they need to become more aggressive rather than, as Maher says, assuming the victimhood status that Kamala Harris has now adopted. He seems to think, like me, that Peter Buttigieg would have been a great running mate, and I still feel that Mayor Peter is our best hope for 2028 at this point. But all my friends tell me that America isn’t ready for a gay President.  This makes me angry, as that attitude takes out of the running one of our best candidates, and haven’t we finally accepted gay people? (One friend that arguments about trans issues have accidentally created more rancor against gays.)

I still am astonished at the Democrats’ enthusiasm for a candidate who was palpably incoherent and muddled–even saying that she was “brat” (that was praise), and brought people “joy.”  Seriously? What is wrong with the Democrats?  That, my friends, brothers and sisters, and comrades, is the question we have to answer.  Maher suggests that Democratic women carry the main burden of saving the party. Do you agree?

 

 

Bill Maher’s latest monologues (one of them superb)

September 29, 2025 • 11:15 am

Here’s the latest from Bill Maher’s Friday “Real Time” show. First, the “New Rule” segment called “Let’s make a deal.” This is perhaps the best Maher bit I’ve ever heard. It’s funny, but the main point is not its humor but its message, which is deadly serious.

The guests you see (one of whom Maher points at when he disses Republicans) are “Michael Smerconish, host of ‘Smerconish’ on CNN and ‘The Michael Smerconish Program’ on SiriusXM; and Rep. Nancy Mace, Republican congresswoman from South Carolina’s 1st district who also sits on the Armed Services, Veterans’ Affairs, and Oversight committees.”

The “deal” Maher asks for is a Devil’s bargain in which the Left gives up stupid ideas or phrases in agreement with the Right doing the same thing, e.g., “You stop saying saying ‘thoughts and prayers,’ and we’ll stop with the land acknowledgments.” The Big Bargain though, is this: “The Left should stop their seriously woke shit, and the Right should stop their slide into autocracy.”

The emphasis then becomes the craziness of the Left that needs to vanish, like the refusal of people like Neil deGrasse Tyson to admit that sports should be divided by sex, or allowing kids to transition genders when they are too young. Other examples: “Queers for Palestine” or the “Healthy at any weight” mantra.

This Left-wing penchat for craziness, which goes along with their dictum that there be no debate about it, is, argues Maher (and I agree) a recipe for the continuing electoral losses of Democrats.

The Right gets it in the neck, too, for trying to turn America into an authoritarian police state and all the crazy crap that Republicans want.  The first step for Republicans? “Find one thing that Trump wants, and tell him NO.” As he says, ‘What good is Making America Great Again if you wind up losing the ‘America’ part?”

This is one of the finest monologues I’ve heard from Maher, and I wish that the “progressive” Democrats, part of MY party, would listen to and heed it.  As for the Republicans, well, they won’t listen to Maher anyway, but his last sentence is a slogan they should take to heart.

. . . and a two minute opening on the rise of autocracy, calling out Trump for being in a “pulling people over for their broken taillight” phase.

Two bits from Bill Maher’s latest show

September 21, 2025 • 10:45 am

Here are two short (ca. 7 minutes each) clips from Friday’s “Real Time” show with Bill Maher; watch ’em before they take them down.  They’re both good–and larded with humor.

The first is his opening monologue about the censorship and fear of American media. Maher points out that Jimmy Kimmel’s firing occurred exactly 24 years after Maher’s firing, also from ABC, and Kimmel was Maher’s replacement.  As Wikipedia notes,

ABC decided against renewing Maher’s contract for Politically Incorrect in 2002, after he made a controversial on-air remark six days after the September 11 attacks. He agreed with his guest, conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza, that the 9/11 terrorists did not act in a cowardly manner (in rebuttal to President Bush‘s statement calling them cowards). Maher said, “We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly. You’re right.”

Maher supports Kimmel’s right to say what he wanted, but adds, re Charlie Kirk’s killer, “It is a fool’s errand to try to say that these nuts who do these things are on a team.” At any rate, Tyler Robinson is, to Maher, is simply a nutjob who shouldn’t be put on either the Right or Left. He’s right in that it’s not very relevant, as political violence comes from both sides, but I’d say that Robinson is more Leftish.

It’s a good monologue with some grabby jokes, but, as always, Maher’s position is clear. I kow Maher has writers, so I wonder how much of these monologues are of his own creation. But for sure the delivery, which is great, is his alone.

And in the later sit-down bit, Maher once again takes up the political affiliation of the killer in a “five stages of grief” schtick about political violence., with the last stage being, “Please don’t be in the same ethnic group as me.” The message is the same as above: don’t put nutjobs who commit political violence into political boxes. (Maher said at the start that he was giving his message prematurely.) He gives quite a few other examples of hard-to-place criminals or accused criminals.

If America is to become less tribalistic and divisive, this desperate effort to pin blame on those not of your tribe has got to stop.

Finally, here’s a screenshot of Maher’s reaction to the display of anti-Israeli sentiment at the Emmys (I couldn’t resist: he gives a flehmen response at 5:31).