Free Speech
Matt Welch | From the March 2024 issue
December, the public research firm WPA Intelligence came out with a small survey with potentially huge—and widely ignored—implications for institutional media, entertainment, and government.
Asking 1,000 registered voters which of eight listed media personalities they trusted, the firm found podcast iconoclast Joe Rogan—who has been serially singled out by the Joe Biden White House for COVID-19 "misinformation"—in second place with 36 percent, just edging out former Fox News host Tucker Carlson's 35 percent and Daily Wire impresario Ben Shapiro's 33, and far ahead of the industry-respected CNN anchor Jake Tapper (23 percent).
In first place, with 40 percent, including the highest ratings of the group among political independents? Comedian Bill Maher.
Maher, whose 22nd season of HBO's Real Time debuted January 19, the day before his 68th birthday, finds himself in an unusually important position in American discourse as he enters a 30th consecutive year hosting a political talk show on TV. As elite journalists increasingly shy away from "platforming" allegedly dangerous conservatives, Maher eagerly slings the bull with the Steve Bannons and Vivek Ramaswamys of the world. As late-night comedians elicit "clapter" for their dutiful swipes at Donald Trump, the HBO host still aims for actual laughs, in part by making his own political side uncomfortable. And in an era when both left and right are abandoning bedrock Enlightenment values of due process and free speech, Maher has become one of the most insistent (critics would say hectoring) voices for old-school liberalism.
"It's a small band of us," Maher says at the Beverly Hills Hotel's famed Polo Lounge, "but we're the ones who haven't gone insane, and people know it."
Maher is stubborn, tolerant, energetic, and a tad eccentric. He brought a dropper of organic water flavoring to lunch, explaining: "Am I a chemist? Have I vetted it? No, but I really believe them. And Aaron Rodgers texted me and said he's doing it." Over the decades he has been one the most influential public figures to normalize the recreational use of marijuana, sitting on the advisory board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). Twice during the 2023 Writers Guild strike he came close to breaking ranks and bringing his show back sans writers, as he had in 2008.
As a potentially insane 2024 election year wheezes into gear, Maher is calling for Biden to step down, gearing up for a comedy tour titled "WTF?" releasing a book collecting his editorials over the past two decades, and continuing his popular new video podcast Club Random, where he gets high with celebrities and tries not to talk about politics.
Reason's Matt Welch sat down with Maher on January 5 to talk about his career, the state of free speech, and wrestling with such characters as Kanye West.
Reason: How often are you stoned on Club Random?
Maher: Oh, constantly. The whole point of the show is I'm completely stoned. And I'm not hiding it.
Who's the best stoned interviewee? Who has just lost it so far?
Probably Kanye, but we never aired that one.
You're suppressing sweet Kanye material!
Oh, I would've been canceled. I mean, I try to resist bending the knee—I think I do it better than almost anybody else in media—to the woke shit, but sometimes, you know, you will just be canceled.
We did that right around when he was first starting ranting about the Jews. I wanted to have him over to instruct him, in a nice way. Everybody else was yelling at him, and that's not the way to get through to somebody. And he's a sweet guy—I mean, he's not a terrible guy. He is a narcissist in the sense of the last thing he would ever think to say to me was, "What's going on with you?"
But I did, I think, get through to him about antisemitism. I don't know if it stuck. Apparently it didn't, because he said things since like "I like Hitler," so.
He was on time, very normal. I think he had been thrown off social media, so he had no outlet and he wanted to go to a few places and get his story out. And he was cool; we laughed our asses off for a couple hours and smoked a lot. And I tried to explain to him about people who are successful in business—you know, that's capitalism. They're going to be rough in business. It's just capitalism, and Jews are good at it, so maybe that's why you're beefing so much about it.
But it was still risqué enough that you didn't want to—
No, it wasn't just that I didn't want to get canceled. It was that I thought giving him, with the level of his antisemitism, more oxygen—no, I didn't want to participate in that. I was hoping I could get him to recant, basically, and I could not. I got him to listen, and then we'd go onto something else and laugh and laugh and laugh, and then it would just sort of like come back again, and he would say something. I'd be like, "Now Kanye, OK, there's that Jew thing again!" So I thought I had a noble purpose, but then when it did not come around to what I hoped: No, I'm not going to help him. That's just a bridge too far.
I want to talk a bit about the program that you do on television and look on its history, because you're in year 30 of doing political comedy.
Thirty consecutive years on TV: That's a lot! It's amazing that it gets no coverage in the mainstream media. Really, that's not a story? I know I'm a bad person because I don't bend a knee to the woke doctrine, but wow, that's a lot to look past.
I don't know, in your age and decrepitude, whether you remember where your memory was 30 years ago—
It's not the age, it's the pot!
But when you were starting [Maher's previous TV show] Politically Incorrect, and to the extent that you had a mission of what you were doing besides getting laughs and getting ratings and getting renewals, what was that mission? And how has that changed over the years?
Well, it's in the title, Politically Incorrect. That was not a phrase at the time. But that was really what it is. Political correctness, even in the early '90s, was starting to be out of control.
And also funny to make fun of.
Exactly. I mean, it was a nice barn to throw stuff at; you couldn't miss if you were honest about it. It was a zeitgeist, a feeling in the culture that the political correctness was going too far. And I thought maybe I could put a stake in its heart. And of course, just like the Kanye thing, completely failed, because it only metastasized and got worse. Incredibly worse.
I remember when I started editing Reason in 2008, the phrase and the concept of political correctness felt like a '90s thing. Your show came out. Comedy Central was very much in the thick of it; the South Park guys came out right around then. And even some of the early online media felt a little post-partisan, like Salon.com had David Horowitz and Camille Paglia writing as columnists.
The Huffington Post!
Right? When Arianna was still almost a right-winger.
Yes. And I was very, I wouldn't say involved on an official level, but she was a very, very—and still is a very, very—close friend. And I think it was Andrew Breitbart, he's a byword now for ultra-conservative, he was one of her friends and was on the project. So, come on, man. I mean, when they say, you know, "You've changed." I've changed? Come on. Things change.
So I was talking early in my editorhood to Greg Lukianoff from [the free speech and civil liberties advocacy organization] FIRE, who you had on recently. Back then FIRE was still just doing campus stuff and hadn't expanded.
Yeah, there's a little cadre of you guys—you and him and Bari [Weiss] and Andrew Sullivan, who are just so great that you exist in this culture, because it's a small band of us, but we're the ones who haven't gone insane, and people know it.
In talking with Greg in those days, they'd been tracking this stuff on campus, and I was like, "OK you guys are fighting in education, but didn't we win the politically correct wars in the '90s?" And he's like, "You are so wrong about that." It's just that we stopped talking about it as a country, but meanwhile all the institutions got totally infected.
They really did. And that's how you wound up with college campuses being Team Hamas. "Hey liberals! Let's get behind the most illiberal people in the world! Let's get with the people who put a bag over women's heads and make them have a male guardian if they want to leave the house." I could never have predicted it. So insane.
Since you have more proximity to and grounding in the left of the center of the median, do you have a working theory of what the hell happened?
That's a great question. I mean, I know there are people who think that it's a deliberate communist infiltration; that I find hard to believe. But I do think it starts with stuff in the universities. As I called it in an editorial recently, that's the mouth of the river from which all the nonsense comes. Which is how we saw what we saw post–October 7 on the campuses, and the Harvard president resigning, and so forth.
I was recently remembering the Ari Fleischer quote, where he was asked about your comment not long after September 11 about the comparative cowardliness of Americans sending bombs from afar. His response when asked, "What do you say to Bill Maher's quote," was, "Americans have to watch what they say." Which was not great! It was not great for the spokesman of the president of the United States to say that as a general thing, or even as a specific thing.
Everybody on the left was on my side. As they should be. And that should pertain to both sides, left and right. It was wrong when someone from the right said, "Americans should watch what they say," but who are we really watching what we say for now, more than anybody? The left. That's who you have to watch what you say around.
Look, it's not like cancel culture doesn't exist on the right. I've pointed out before: Nobody got canceled harder than Colin Kaepernick. OK? So it happens both ways. But it's more of a left thing. People are much more afraid. Obviously people in the public eye even more so, but even just around the office, people are worried: "I have a thought; just safer not to say it." And that's a bad place to be.
I referenced the Ari Fleischer quote on CNN recently, in an amazing segment from a few months ago in reaction to one of these court cases that went against the Biden administration for trying to suppress speech, especially COVID-related health speech and "misinformation." I sat with a panel of journalists who were all just shaking their damn heads at the judge not allowing the Biden administration to crack down on all these lying misinformation people. As I was saying on CNN, I couldn't believe that we got to this point where journalists are cheering on the White House engaging in actual censorship, saying from the same podium that Spotify really needs to do more to crack down on Joe Rogan, that there's a dirty dozen list of people who spread the most misinformation about COVID.
Misinformation. One of the other most weasel fucking words. Whose misinformation? These people—the "science" people—have no idea what science is, that it's something that's tested every day. Otherwise it's religion. What they're talking about, what they have is a religion. Ridiculous.
I think of the survey that they did about COVID in 2021, where something like almost 50 percent of Democrats thought that if you got COVID, there was a 50 percent chance you would get hospitalized, when it was actually more like 1 percent. Obviously, that tells you something about a media bubble on the left also. I mean, that's some crazy misinformation. So maybe a quarter of the country, half of the liberal side of the country, is going around with the idea that half the people who get COVID go to the hospital. Of course they're going to believe in crazy stupid overreaction tactics to deal with this. So nobody has a monopoly on misinformation.
How often do you get accused of "platforming"? When Politically Incorrect started, one of the things that was refreshing about it was that it was a place where people with different points of view about politics could laugh and talk about it as if they were real human beings. I just presumed that everyone would be copying that model, but it seems to have run in the opposite direction now, where just the idea of even a straight-news television program having people who have different political views seems odd.
I had [Ron] DeSantis and Ted Cruz on this year, and Bill Barr. And yes, to answer your question, I can think of two people—and I won't say who they are; one of them is pretty famous—just yelling at me in an email about that. And my answer to that is: Fuck off. You know what? You live in your ivory tower. I'm going to talk to everybody in the half of the country that you find is so deplorable. They're not going to self-deport, even if they are deplorable.
And some of them are! And some on the left are deplorable too, and incredibly obnoxious. That's the country!
When historians look back in a hundred years, if we're still here, I don't think they're going to divide the country like we do into these two camps. They're going to say: As a people, they were obnoxious. It happens in different forms on both sides. As a people, they didn't believe in science. On the right, they think global warming is a hoax or whatever nonsense they believe about that. And on the left, they think men can have babies. That's what they'll say. They'll say, "As a people, they just lost their shit."
Do you have a special sense of either foreboding or humor, even if it's a little bit mordant, about 2024?
I think I'm where a lot of people are: I wish Biden would step aside. Well, first, I wish Trump doesn't win, but he totally could, and it's looking more like he will. But a lot can change in a year. We haven't had any of his trials—although if the January 6 commission and the media and everything else haven't changed people's minds about liking him, I think these trials are only going to make him look like a revolutionary leader. All you have to say is, "The people who put me on trial were corrupt!" And then your ignominious behavior becomes a badge of honor. So whether the trials are going to help or hurt him, it's hard to say. I think it'll be about a draw, and then it'll really be a referendum on which side is crazier.
And both sides have a case, although I always fall on the side of "Trump of course is truly crazy." He's stupid and crazy. They're two completely different things, but he has both of them. I'm even more worried about the crazy side, but crazy photographs, insanity photographs, it's compelling. And when he shows up, come on, people are going to cover it, watch it. It's not going to be boring. And in this unfactual society, I don't think any of the issues really are what most people vote on anyway. It doesn't really matter what any of them say or do, because they each have their own media sources, who are in the business of feeding back to their audience what they want to hear.
Trump has been so weird for comedy. He's inherently funny—as a comedian, he's got really good laugh-out-loud timing. But also as a character, he's funny. And yet for institutional comedy, for Saturday Night Live comedy, I think he's been terrible. Why? How did they screw up such an obvious thing?
I must say first, the guy on Saturday Night Live who does him now [James Austin Johnson] is genius at it. So much better than any of the other people who did him. Alec Baldwin's not an impressionist; he did a passable job, but it was just a vehicle to put stupid words in Trump's mouth, which, who can't do that? I mean, I don't disagree with the spirit of it; it just gets old. But this guy captures what I was saying a minute ago, the insanity. He captures that he is insane, because he talks exactly the way Trump sounds: stream of consciousness, one thought ping-ponging to another one that may or may not be connected. That's what kills me. That's the best thing they do on that show.
That's good. But generally speaking, and not just to single out SNL, late-night comedy overall has, at least for my taste, and maybe you have a different opinion—
Oh, no. I don't really want to talk about it, because I get in trouble if I start talking about other people doing political comedy on TV. Let's just say: There's a place for everybody, and everybody's super talented, and they're just doing different things!
But one way that I find there to be this weird separation, is that there's a demonstrated audience for what you do. There's an audience for Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, us, people who are doing similar things. And they give us feedback that is similar to the feedback you get as well. And then if you look in the world of comedy, the places where comedy is institutional, they seem to be losing audiences. But the individuals who are out there on Netflix, and who've gone solo? The people who don't give a fuck are out there killing it. Why such a split? Why is it so that the institutions can't recognize and learn from the people who are killing it?
It's my mouth-of-the-river theory. The mouth of the river is the elite colleges. Those spoiled kids who go to those elite colleges who do nothing but complain about privilege while they lead the most privileged life possible. They have the ultimate privilege, which is the ability to spout nonsense without any sort of consequence and to believe in impractical things. So that's who goes to those colleges. It's a very small world in that world. The same kind of kids who go to the same kind of schools, same kind of neighborhoods they grew up in, go to these colleges. So they're in this sort of bubble where they're feeding this stuff to each other.
Who knows where the actual origin is. It's kind of like AIDS: Was it a monkey? I don't know. Something like that. Maybe this was a monkey; I don't know. But then they go into media, so now they have the bullhorn, right? So it's not a big number of people, but it's the people who are controlling it.
When I first received your show thousands of years ago, I took it as this new thing, and I'm sure you felt it as a new thing, a new kind of genre. But now I wonder: Was it also maybe the last of an old thing? You ever look at those old Merv Griffin clips, or—
David Susskind?
Exactly. Or Dick Cavett: Let's just get John Lennon on to talk about crazy shit with someone over here.
Yeah, that's what I was doing with Politically Incorrect. I was bringing back something. I never claimed I invented the idea of having different people on this show at the same time—talk shows had moved away from that. So it was in a way a renaissance of something from the antiquity of television.
I of course took it to a different level. It was sort of a designed train wreck, that show, right? You were supposed to have Bob Dole on with Carrot Top because the idea was they both get to vote, so they both really have the same power, or whatever. And so that was the charm.
It was also a silly show in many ways, because that often rendered just silliness. But it was a comedy show. First of all, it was a half-hour long minus eight minutes of commercials. We had 22 minutes for four people plus me to talk, minus a monologue. I mean, you couldn't really get too deep into a lot of issues.
So Real Time comes on. More space, more serious-ish. More explicitly political.
The difference was there wasn't Carrot Top. And I say that as someone who loves Carrot Top: He's a super smart guy but not right for sitting on a panel. It's people like you now. In the old show, we were always trying to have and needed celebrity value. There are some celebrities now, but there are very few, and they are almost never on the panel. This is a team of thinkers.
So 2025, what are you going to do? Do you want to keep doing this?
I'll probably do it until they kick me out. I can't think of a better job.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
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