I said this on this show many many years ago because this is my 10th year on the show and I said there are times when I walk into a community and I see um American flags all over the community and I suddenly feel unsafe because there is a section of this country that has co-opted the American flag and they equate u being an American or an American flag with white supremacy. Maybe the problem isn't that America isn't worth defending. Maybe the problem is that lots of people today are entitled whiners who have no perspective and no idea how good they have it.
[applause] 59% of self-identified liberals say there have been times when they considered leaving America for good, like after NBC canceled the West Wing. [laughter] You just heard Sunonny Host, but that's nothing compared to what she says later in this video. and Bill Maher's response to her thoughts about America just as brutal.
He tore her apart line by line on live TV without holding back for a second. But before we move further, if you enjoy short commentary videos with full breakdowns, take just 2 seconds to subscribe to the channel. All right, now let's get back to our video.
I think it's a very complicated country. And at this point, I am embarrassed at our government. I'm embarrassed um at our lack of healthcare.
I'm embarrassed uh of our of our Congress. It's really American, Sunny. I'm embarrassed about all those things.
And I'm also embarrassed at how America is now [music] seen across uh the globe. I don't think that many Americans understand that we are part of a wonderful global community. And when you look at our allies, our allies are now giving us a one-star rating as a country.
While [music] I um am conflicted uh about this country because I feel that it is at this point a failed experiment quite frankly. Um I I am also discouraged by how this country is viewed by the rest of the world. You think it's already failed?
You don't think it's you think it's beyond redemption at this point? Um I think at this point it is failing. It is a failed.
Sunonny Host said America is a failed experiment. Read that again. On live TV to millions of American families watching their morning coffee, according to a Fox News industry report on daytime ratings, The View still pulls in a large weekday audience.
But the political trust score on the show has collapsed to some of the lowest numbers ever recorded for a network daytime program. Some critics argue Sunny just handed the mainstream Democratic party its worst public relations moment of the year. Others say she has been quietly saying the [music] same thing for months and nobody stopped her.
Maybe the problem isn't that America isn't worth defending. Maybe the problem is that lots of people today are entitled whiners who have no perspective [music] and no idea how good they have it. [applause] 59% of self-identified liberals say there have been times when they considered [music] leaving America for good, like after NBC canceled the West Wing.
[laughter] I don't get it. You want so badly for every immigrant to come to this country and experience the good life, but somehow it's so terrible you want to leave. And I see conservatives in Texas are talking secession again.
They have two bumper stickers [music] in that state. America, love it or leave it, and we're leaving it. [laughter] [applause] Bill Maher's response was clear and direct.
entitled winers. No [music] perspective, no idea how good they have it, and the numbers back him up hard. The KO Institute reported in 2024 that the United States is still the most desired destination for legal migration around the world, drawing substantially more prospective migrants than any other nation.
The people already inside the country keep saying they want to leave. The rest of the world keeps trying to break down the door to get in. I said this on this show many many years ago because this is my 10th year on the show and I said there are times when I walk into a community and I see um American flags all over the community and I suddenly feel unsafe because there is a section of this country that has co-opted the American flag and they equate being an American or an American flag with white supremacy.
Oh, that's wonderful. [music] Yeah, I think you summed it up. [laughter] Yeah.
Gone are the days when Democrats would at least pretend to be patriotic. They used to stack their campaign stages with flags, adorn their lapels with little flag pins, and even say the pledge of allegiance without vomiting. But not anymore.
Now they recoil like Drcula when he sees the sun. Hell, Sunny wouldn't even have a good time at Six Flags. But this is typical of her.
just because she feels something that's completely made up in her mind like feeling unsafe around flags. Feeling unsafe around the American flag. That was the moment daytime TV lost the middle of the country.
A Reuters Ipso's poll from July 2024 found that a majority of American adults across every racial background said the flag still represents unity, opportunity, and shared national identity for them. And that percentage has stayed strong for years. Bill Maher's argument here is direct.
The flag never changed. The people describing it changed. When a national talk show co-host tells the country the American flag frightens her, working families across every zip code hear the message loud and clear, and they respond by tuning out.
Well, it's more than three three or four years. It's longer than that, but there definitely was a shift. I mean, this is the debate I'm always having with my critics who would like to say, "I've changed.
" And I have a million ways of saying it to them, but basically I didn't change. I didn't forget what it is to be is I didn't become a conservative. You forgot what it was to be a liberal.
And we don't have to go through all the ways that the left, the far left has gone off the deep end, but it is what got Trump elected and so forth. So did I change? I didn't.
And I wrote whole wrote a whole book or like took stuff from my show mostly, but weaved it together into a book that basically tried to prove that point. Look at my history. I'm pretty much always the same, right?
[music] You know, but I will I will put the reasonable in there because I feel like you listen a little more now. I didn't change. You forgot what it was to be a liberal.
One sentence delivered clean. Bill Maher just said what half of the Democratic base has been afraid to admit publicly. Critics argue this could be one of the most notable lines a lifelong Democrat has delivered on television in years.
According to a September 2024 Ipsos poll on party favorability, Democratic favorability among moderate voters has fallen to some of the lowest numbers recorded in the last two decades. Independents have followed the same slide. The people are not leaving the party because the party failed them once.
They are leaving because the party stopped sounding like anything they signed up for. Let me ask you this because although 1776 uh was freedom for many Americans, certainly wasn't freedom for the enslaved for black Americans. So you also explore the hypocrisy of white American colonists who claimed they were being enslaved by the British while they themselves held enslaved black people.
Right. So who were off uh and those [clears throat] black people were often relied upon to fight for freedoms that they were never intended to receive. That's exactly so talk a little bit about that.
I know we're running out of time and that contradiction and the role that slavery played. Sunny then went after 1776 itself, the founding, the whole birth of the country. Bill Maher's answer was calm and devastating.
Nobody is denying the pain of American history. Every serious historian in the country agrees on the injustices of the past. But rejecting the entire founding of the country is a very different position.
And it is a position most Americans reject. And yet there is a recurrent theme on the far left that things have never been worse. Kevin Hart expressed a view many hold when he told the New York Times, "You're witnessing white power and white privilege at an all-time high.
" This is one of the big problems with wokeness that what you say doesn't have to make sense or jive with the facts or ever be challenged lest the challenge itself be conflated with racism. But saying white power and privilege is at an all-time high is just ridiculous. Higher than a century ago, the year of the Tulsa race massacre.
Higher than the years when the KKK rode unchecked and Jim Crow went unchallenged. Higher than the 1960s when the Supremes and Willie Mays still couldn't stay in the same hotel as the white people they were working with. Higher than during slavery.
And I mean actual slavery, not Prince doesn't like his record contract slavery. [applause] White power at an all-time high. That is what a major celebrity told the New York Times.
Bill Maher took the sentence apart in real time. Higher than a century ago when entire American communities were wiped off the map. Higher than the pre-ivil rights era.
Higher than during actual legal slavery. The math is not even close. Some critics argue this is the exact reason celebrity commentary keeps losing the middle of the country.
When you have to erase actual American history to keep the current outrage machine running, regular voters catch on quickly. And once they catch on, they never come back. This is the worst time it's ever been.
This is the best time it's ever been. You know, we're in a fetal position. We were way more divided during the revolution.
We were way more divided in the civil war. We were way more divided in the period after the civil war called reconstruction and its collapse. We were way more divided during the Vietnam period.
That we we're a divided people. Our nation is born in violence and that and and the disagreements between think and we had a lot of people who fought and died to protect the British [music] interests. It wasn't just us against them.
It's the loyalists that were amongst the the population. And I think everybody should stop and ask themselves, are you absolutely sure you'd be a patriot? This is the worst time it's ever been.
Sunny said that with a straight face. To Americans living the safest, longest, [music] most connected lives in national history. According to the US Centers for Disease Control, American life expectancy today is nearly 30 years longer than it was in 1900.
Household income adjusted for inflation is at historic highs. Access to medicine, food, and technology has never been better for the average family. While critics say Sunny is describing a country that only exists inside a TV studio, it's telling that in a recent Harvard youth poll of Americans between 18 and 29, 72% of blacks said they were hopeful about the future of America, as compared to only 46% of whites.
I'm not surprised. There are a hell of a lot of Americans trying really hard these days to embrace a new spirit of inclusion and self-reflection. And this progressive allergy to acknowledging societal advances is self-defeating because progress and hope that we can achieve it is the product we're selling.
And having a warped view of reality leads to policies that are warped. [music] Black only dorms and graduation ceremonies. a growing belief in whiteness as a malady and white people as irredeemable, giving up on a color-blind society.
Only if you believe we've made no progress does any of that make sense. I can name some things that actually are worse than they've ever been before, like the environment and homelessness in LA and the prospects for maintaining an actual democracy in America. But where progress has been made, it's not a sin.
And it's certainly not inaccurate to say, "We've come a long way, baby. Not mission accomplished, just a long way. " Bill Maher walked in with the receipt that ended the conversation.
72% of young black Americans said they are hopeful about the future of the country. 46% of young white Americans said the same. Read those two lines together.
The exact group Sunny keeps painting as hopeless is the most hopeful demographic in the country. Some critics argue Mah just proved the whole storyline coming out of daytime TV is upside down. The people living the story keep saying they see progress.
The people describing the story on television keep saying no progress exists. Somebody is being honest and the numbers show it is not the panel on set. That has been so shocking to me to read that and read people saying that and references to that.
Puerto Ricans don't celebrate July 4th in that way in the way that African-Americans don't celebrate 1776 because [music] African-Americans were enslaved in 1776. They were not um considered people. They were considered three-fifths of a person.
And so you want me to celebrate 1776 when my ancestors were not free, right? that were not in were not independent didn't get independence. I mean, think about that.
Think about what a big ask that is. It's pretty significant. Can you look at the 250 and say there are things to celebrate about the fact that the America's got a birthday that it's here and there are parts of our complicated but it's complicated and we've got to be honest about it.
That's the most important thing. concern is there are many people that refuse to be honest about it that still say this is the greatest nation in the world. Sunny said, "Black Americans and Puerto Ricans do not celebrate Independence Day.
Millions of American families would like a word. Every July, cookouts happen, parades [music] happen, fireworks fill the sky in every American neighborhood, including black neighborhoods and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. " speaking for entire communities in one blanket statement on TV is not journalism.
It is projection. And the communities Sunny keeps naming have been quietly rejecting her message for years. And the ratings drift proves it.
I wore it every day and nobody thought it meant that I love Nixon. [music] Because 50 years ago, liberals didn't concede patriotism. Abby Hoffman was the quintessential 60s radical.
And when he had to appear before the House on American Activities Committee, he wore an American flag shirt, which some cops later ripped off his back. Because the message that most threatens authoritarians isn't America sucks, it's America is ours, too. [applause] [applause] Every election year, Democrats seem to remember patriotism for about an hour at their convention when they're trying to win back swing voters.
The whole message of Kamla's speech in 2024 was take back the flag. That's why she talked about America like a pageant contestant. The greatest privilege on earth.
The privilege and pride of being an American. Hard to believe she lost, huh? Well, you can't take back the flag in an hour if the rest of the time you treat patriotism as something vaguely embarrassing.
You cannot take back the flag in an hour if you spend the rest of the time treating patriotism as embarrassing. According to a Public Religion Research Institute report from 2024, a large majority of American voters, including nearly all Republicans, most independents, and even a majority of moderate Democrats, said they wanted political leaders who visibly love the country. The far-left wing of the party keeps failing that basic test on live television every single week.
Some critics believe this is why the party keeps losing swing voters, no matter how much money they spend. The country is not asking for perfection. The country is asking for pride.
Now I want to hear from you. So tell me, has the view officially lost the country for good? And is 2028 the year the Democratic Party finally rediscovers patriotism or the year they lose America once and for all?
Before you leave, drop your answer in the comments. Hit that like if Mar said what needed to be said and subscribe because what's coming next will be even more interesting.
