Although leftist comedian Bill Maher has found some common ground with conservative in recent years on issues such as “cancel culture,” he has not shed his penchant for knee-jerk denunciation of provocative statements by right-wing pundits.
That tendency was on display during a recent episode of his HBO series “Real Time.”
The host took aim at a speech delivered at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference by writer Jack Posobiec, who began by sardonically asserting that he would be leading a mission to “end” democracy but soon delivered a list of actions already being pursued by leftist politicians and activists.
Maher apparently missed the nuance, however, and ridiculed Posobiec to the applause of his audience. Of course, he was not the only media figure who took the remarks at face value without considering the context.
“Am I missing the joke?” Maher asked. “Or it seems now they are saying the quiet part out loud. This is their big convention and you have a guy like this and the crowd is loving it. ‘Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it. Jan. 6 was good, now we’re going to finish the job.’ Thoughts?”
Batya Ungar-Sargon, a panelist on the show, clued Maher in on the speaker’s seemingly obvious intended message.
“Am I missing the irony?” Maher asked.
“I think so, yes,” Ungar-Sargon replied. “This is a joke.”
Others who understood the true meaning of Posobiec’s speech weighed in on social media.
Pollster Richard Baris wrote: “Ironically, [Maher] tells [Posobiec] to ‘keep your day job’ insinuating it wasn’t a funny joke. Now THAT’S irony. Bill is a day-job comedian who falls for every media hoax each time he wades into politics. He then asks if he’s missing something. Always, Bill. Always.”
Posobiec later shared that his supposed plan to destroy America’s system of government involved “ending paper ballots” and removing “all voter ID and all citizenship requirements for voting,” replacing “in-person voting with low-integrity mail and options and dropboxes.”
Money is no longer ‘coming in over the transom’ in cable news (people ‘cut the cords’ and stream more news) – so these giant anchor salaries for low ratings (low viewership means low ad revenue) hurts news orgs…the world has changed https://t.co/cHc81ezo0q
— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) February 24, 2024
He went on to ironically advocate for social media censorship, the placement of “state assets in all mainstream media” and efforts to throw protesters in jail.
“We’re going to lock up and remove opposition parties and opposition candidates from the ballot,” he continued. “We’re going to arrest the opposition leader four times. We’ll flood the nation with millions of invaders who vote the way we want, release violent criminals into the cities, disarm the populace, remove religion from the public square, lock up bloggers who published government documents called WikiLeaks.”
