r/RealTime

At this point I can’t help but notice this and it’s turning me off the show. It’s a very distinct laugh/holler and I can’t be the only one who notices it. Every episode for years now. Is it a crew member? Or a very loyal fan who is in the audience for literally every single show. It creeps me out and has become more than a distraction at this point.

Serious question. Bill gets enormous criticism for his dinner with Donnie. Now I despise Trump as much as any patriotic American but I can neglect his White House visit.

Ana had a long discussion with Bill.

Did she “Sell out”?

Bill Maher keeps telling us that he has not changed *at all* over time.

He donated $1 million to the Democratic party in 2012 and again $1 million to a Democratic senate majority super PAC in 2018.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Maher said:

“In 2012 I did this, but this is different. That was for my country. I thought it was very important that the first black president get a second term, and all the money in the country was going to the Republicans.”

“This time it’s a little more personal. I’m worried about this country and really what’s going to happen to it on a very existential level, including my own ass. I got a lot of messages from people yesterday saying ‘good for you,’ and I just want to say for the ones who are rich who said that: Not enough. Not enough to say that to me.”

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A couple of observations:

Today, Maher tends to be on the white-Republican bandwagon of "stop making everything about identity! Identity is woke!" whereas he clearly stated that he invested a million dollars into getting Barack Obama elected because Obama is Black. This is a change in Bill Maher, a man who says he has not changed.

In 2018, Maher donated a million dollars to save his "own ass" because he had been such a vocal critic of Trump and made himself an enemy of the Republican party by 2018.

He effectively admitted he was afraid for himself two years into Trump's first administration. This notably was two years before COVID and two years before Black Lives Matter reached the height of its influence, which are two of the events that gave Maher an opportunity to scurry rightward and become a vocal advocate against vaccines and other aspects of public health, to gravitate toward his friend RFK Jr., and to regard all forms of social equality as "woke." (I really hate that people stopped calling it 'wokeness,' at least, instead of just 'woke,' but it does help to determine who consumes Republican MAGA media to note who does that and Maher is one of those people.)

SO: Bill Maher insists he has not changed at all, but we see that he did a 180° turnaround on identity politics after having given a million dollars to support electing a Black president and clearly stating he gave the second million out of personal fear before he opted into a public-health disinformation campaign during COVID.

Maher was a major environmentalist for decades. Now be is not. He said this to his right-wing friend Tim Allen on his podcast: “So as long as there’s 6,000 flights a day, me doing one more? I’m sorry, I’m not going to be on Greta [Thunberg]‘s sailboat, OK? Because I hear getting the s*** off that thing is a mess.”

It's probably worth noting that Maher continues to ca Elon Musk, a card-waggling white supremacist and misogynist of the Nth degree, and Peter Thiel, a certifiably insane person, geniuses, and Thiel has during multiple public interviews and private lectures said that Greta Thunberg is the literal Antichrist who has come to destroy humanity, and Maher and hardly anyone else uses Thunberg's environmentalism as a semi-regular punchline.

Bill Maher is 70 years old and he constantly refers back to his college days when he says he couldn't "get laid" and he seems to have an adolescent ego at age 70 that makes him prone to being changed in an instant by being put into close proximity with bad-boy influences like Trump, Musk, Thiel, and RFK. I wonder if that's what he means by saying he has not changed. What he supports politically has changed completely. He went from telling his audience that Trump was waging a coup against the US for the better part of a decade to dining with him and telling us Trump is a really nice and hilarious guy and we should give him more of a chance to do what's best for us, particularly on his anti-woke crusade that Maher once gave a million dollars to support.