You want to know why I have a bug up my ass about the left more than I used to? It's like this. There's an [music] ugliness they never used to have.
The liberals I grew up respecting, none of them are like this. Going after the wife, even the mafia doesn't do that. And Mar says that ugliness exposes an even bigger contradiction.
People who preach tolerance and condemn bullying can become pretty ruthless when someone breaks from the tribe. [applause] There's a lot of people these days who I call liberals in theory. In theory, they hate bullying.
Terrible. In practice, their attitude is, "It's not bullying when I stick your head in the toilet. " And bullying isn't the only principle Mars says disappears when politics gets personal.
Next comes compassion. And his example turns an angry political controversy into a marriage lesson. In theory, liberals are compassionate.
In practice, [music] this guy can't even understand one of the most basic dilemmas common to all humans. that when you're married sometimes you have to swallow some For Maher, that's the trap. Outrage can become so consuming that people start behaving exactly like the political figures they claim to despise.
His solution is brutally simple. [applause] And I might need glasses soon. But but we have to resist the siren call of being an You don't like Trump, then don't be like him.
And Mah isn't suddenly discovering this fight. Long before today's culture wars, he was already attacking political correctness and reminding his own political side when it went too far. Is political correctness out of control?
Of course it is. I think I might have done some sort of show about that. [cheering] That punch line comes with decades of receipts.
Mayor's next point is that criticizing liberals isn't some recent transformation. He says he's been doing it practically his entire career. [applause] I I've been telling liberals when they had spinach on their teeth since 1993.
And he doesn't leave that criticism vague. Maher runs through the exact culture war battles where he believes liberals lost perspective, especially when free expression entered the argument. I've ridiculed them for everything from offensive Halloween costumes to Islamophobia, from the self-esteem movement to college campuses forgetting what free speech is.
But none of that justifies. Years later, Maher's criticism became even more explicit. Instead of another joke about political correctness, he proposed a political bargain and demanded concessions from both sides.
The left will seriously quash all their looney woke and the [music] right will stop the slide into autocracy. That's really the only card left to play. [applause] But why does Maher think the left needs to make that concession?
His answer is uncomfortable. Some conservative criticism of liberal cultural politics, he argues, has landed with voters. The basic problem we have in America is conservatives think the liberals are insane and they're not completely wrong.
Now, I don't think most liberals [music] are insane, but neither do they make it clear they disapprove of the ones who are. And Maher says the real breaking point isn't simply having controversial ideas. It's what happens when disagreement itself becomes unacceptable and questioning the idea gets you condemned.
organ, stop coming up with radically new and often terrible ideas and then then the next breath insist [music] there be no debate about any of it. That if you don't see it right away and go along, you're bad, stupid, and deplorable. And that's the thread running through years of Bill Maher taking shots at his own side.
His argument isn't that liberals should stop being liberal. It's that a movement supposedly built around tolerance, compassion, and open-mindedness creates a contradiction when disagreement is answered with public shaming. That's why his phrase liberals in theory matters.
Maher is attacking the gap he sees between the principle and the behavior. Against bullying until the target has the wrong politics for compassion until somebody refuses to fall perfectly in line. For free expression until somebody expresses the wrong opinion.
And Mahar has been making versions of that argument for decades. He points to political correctness, campus speech battles, and online outrage as examples of liberal cultural politics becoming increasingly restrictive. But there's an important wrinkle here.
Mah isn't simply switching teams. In that final monologue, he attacks both sides. What he calls the left's looney woke politics and what he describes as the rights slide toward autotocracy.
That's what makes his criticism more interesting than a simple left versus right rant. His demand is essentially consistency. If you oppose bullying, don't become the bully.
If you believe in tolerance, tolerate disagreement. If you believe in free speech, that principle becomes most meaningful when somebody says something you hate. And if your political opponent behaves in a way you consider toxic, copying that behavior doesn't suddenly make it virtuous.
