Bill Maher has come under fire from Democrats who claim his rhetoric toward them has flipped — but he says it’s the left that has changed.
“I haven’t turned. Yes, people have said to me, ‘You made fun of the left more than you used to,’ and guilty, I have, because the left has changed,” Maher told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria during a sit-down interview.
Maher, the host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” admitted in the interview that both the left and the right have transformed. But, he argued, the Republican Party is “even worse” than the Democrats.
“I mean, the right doesn’t believe in democracy anymore. I mean, they’ve thrown their lot in with a sociopath named Donald Trump, who only thinks elections count when we win,” Maher said, referring to former President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud in the 2020 election. “OK, well, that’s worse.”
“But it’s not like the left hasn’t changed also,” he added. “So I’m going to call it out wherever I see it.”
Maher then went on to list issues he sees with “gender and race and free speech” as well as communism, border patrol and police abolition efforts.
“No, it’s not that I’ve gotten old, it’s that your ideas are stupid,” he said.
Maher has drawn criticism from progressives after sharply opposing the nationwide college pro-Palestinian protests and supporting Israel’s right to continue its war in Gaza against Hamas.
Among the criticism of the show host is that he supported the college students who protested during the Vietnam War but not the current efforts for the U.S. to divest from Israel.
“That was very different. First of all, the students weren’t against their own,” he said. “These students were threatening other students. That didn’t happen in the Vietnam War.”
“And being against the Vietnam War made sense. It was a war that we probably should not have been in,” Maher added. “But listen, this is demonstrating and protesting for a terrorist group.”
He argued that the younger generation believes that their new ideas are better. New, he said, is not synonymous with better.