 So, for a second, I almost forgot that the smug, elitist, limousine liberal, Bill Maher existed until I saw one of the segments from his show appear in my YouTube subscriptions feed and then I remembered, oh yeah, Bill Maher is a thing. And against my better judgment, I clicked, I watched it, and I wanted to just see like if his show had improved at all, and the answer is a hard no. He basically now is comparable to any typical anti-SJW YouTuber that you'd see. Like you could tune into Tim Pull, Dave Rubin, The Quartering, and Bill Maher sounds exactly like them. At least in this segment he did because he decided to talk about cancel culture. But he correctly pointed out that, you know, the right, they're really trying to weaponize this issue right now and, you know, use it to demonize the left. I know that Jim Jordan is calling for hearings into cancel culture, which is absolutely preposterous and a waste of time, but he's trying to say, look, I'm different than the right when they talk about this issue. So here he is trying to distinguish himself from the bad faith arguments using cancel culture that we hear from Republicans. Now, lately Republicans have been trying to appropriate the term cancel culture to describe what happens to them when they get a just comeuppance for actual crimes. And this muddying the water is unfortunate because cancel culture is real, it's insane, and it's growing exponentially, and it's coming to a neighborhood near you. Okay. So you think that he's not going to do the same tired rehashed argument we've already heard with regard to cancel culture? Like we've already heard the complaints, we know. So you know, he's going to bring something new and valuable to the table. He's going to actually talk about the impact of cancel culture on normal working class Americans. I think this conversation is actually warranted. Like how far should we go in basically letting employers fire and penalize, you know, working class Americans, people who aren't celebrities because of their activity on social media? Of course, I think that racist people getting fired. Like I don't feel bad for them, but also, you know, the principle of firing someone because they have politically incorrect views that does make me feel uneasy because perhaps, you know, people who I know who support BDS and don't support what the government of Israel is doing to Palestinians, you know, I wouldn't want them to be fired for, you know, their speech, get penalized by their employers. So, you know, I think that this conversation is pretty necessary to be had, but that's not really the conversation that Bill Maher has here. And he only cites one example of a man getting fired for using the white power symbol, but that's it. Like that's the one example that he cites. He then pivots to using the same exact arguments that we've heard time and again about how, oh, well, this like person said something, the celebrity said something that's like not politically correct. So they were fired from this company. It's the same thing. It's literally indistinguishable. He doesn't offer us anything new, no unique insight into this issue here. Now, I think that there are intelligent and nuanced critiques of cancel culture. Ben Burgess literally wrote a book on this and I haven't read it yet, but I am interested in reading that to kind of challenge my own beliefs and biases with regard to this issue in particular. But I do kind of want to empathize or sympathize rather with Bill Maher because he was canceled, for lack of a better word, back in the early 2000. So he had a show called Politically Incorrect and he was fired after 9-11 for saying, quote, we have been cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2000 miles away. That's cowardly. And then he then said this about terrorists who hijacked planes on 9-11. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. It's not cowardly. So I understand where he's coming from. He basically was fired because of the outrage mob. So I can understand how he's sensitive to this issue. He cares about this issue. Having said that, though, what he offers, though, contrary to what he promised in the beginning, is not some sort of unique left wing or even liberal approach to cancel culture. He says the same things that Republicans say. And I'll tell you, after we watch the clip, why he's missing the point if he actually wanted to make a valuable point about cancel culture, why he's focusing on the wrong things. 80% of Americans, young, old, rich, poor, conservative, liberal, white, minority, all hate the current atmosphere of hypersensitivity. Yeah, everybody hates it, and no one stands up to it. Because it's always the safe thing to swallow what you really think and just join the mob. So if someone asks you if Justin Timberlake owes Britney Spears an apology for not being a perfect boyfriend when they were teenagers, just say yes. Easy. As Justin did, issuing an abject apology and then vowing to return sexy back to where he found it. We find out that teenage Justin hadn't become a perfect person yet. And when asked if he had sex with the girl whose big hit was called I'm a Slave for You, said yes. What a cat. Although I truly believe any guy willing to wear matching outfits can't be all bad. Now, as for a song called I'm a Slave for You? Nothing? Is this something? The Mandalorians, Gina Carano is a person I'd never heard of and resent that I have now. She's some conservative wrestling chick who kicks ass on a show I wouldn't watch if I was in prison. And she made some Nazi analogy. Who doesn't these days? You're like the Nazis is the new I don't like you. It's always OK when Trump's the Nazi. That disqualifies her for marching around planet who gives a shit in a helmet? By the way, you can't work in Hollywood if you don't believe what we believe. Yeah, in the 50s, that's exactly what the left complained they were being told. Now, the week before it was Chris Harrison's turn in the barrel, he's the host of The Bachelor and is stepping away, stepping away to educate himself on a more profound and productive level than ever before. Oh, good, good. Because all my life I've looked up to the host of the Fuckest Ranger show. And if I thought I couldn't count on The Bachelor for moral guidance, I don't know if I could go on. And of course, he's not stepping away because he's the host of a televised snake pit where 32 female contestants are trapped in the Sahardi house from hell. It's because he wouldn't throw one of them under the bus when it came to light that in college he attended a dress up like we're in the old South Party, which is not a type of party we should be throwing in that it winks at a civilization built on slavery, yes. But apparently in 2018, millions of people were still doing it. And mature people understand humans are continually evolving as opposed to Wokeville, where they're always shocked we didn't emerge enlightened from the primordial ooze. What's Chris Harrison supposed to do? Build a time machine, go back to 2018, and knock the mint juleps out of their hands? So to me, that was not necessarily persuasive at all. This isn't unique. If you genuinely want to approach the issue of cancel culture from a different perspective and not the traditional conservative perspective, why wouldn't you bring up how Colin Kaepernick was blacklisted from the NFL for kneeling during the national anthem? Why wouldn't you bring up how CNN contributor Mark Lamon Hill or The Guardian columnist Nathan J. Robinson were fired because they criticized the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians? Why wouldn't you bring up how an elementary school teacher in Texas was fired because she refused to sign a pro-Israel oath? Why wouldn't you bring up how LGBTQ youth are more likely to be bullied than their straight and cisgender counterparts? I mean, is this not them being canceled? Does cancel culture not apply at a younger age? I mean, these are genuinely terrible instances of cancel culture that I think should be addressed and called out if we want to even use the words cancel culture. I think that has been hijacked by the right and there should be a different term for that now. And I don't want to use their language and be a useful idiot for them unwittingly. But I mean, what he's bringing up here, these are just boring celebrity scandals. And that's not anything that's new. Like what he's saying is not unique at all. I mean, look at the story that he brings up with Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears. He basically makes it seem as if it's bad that Justin Timberlake apologized to Britney Spears after all these years. But is that really that big of a deal? Is that really an issue of cancel culture? Is Justin Timberlake now canceled and ostracized and marginalized from society? No, he's still a multi-millionaire. I mean, is it really a bad thing? Do we really want to not normalize people reflecting on their past bad behavior? Like for me, when I think back to the way that I treated my classmates even in middle school, I cringe and I wish that I could talk to those children today and apologize for the way that I treated them. Am I canceling myself? No, I think that if you want to grow as a society, it's important to look back so that way we don't repeat our mistakes in the future. And really the broader point that was made in that New York Times documentary about Britney Spears, which was fantastic by the way, it went right over his head because the broader point was about how the misogynistic media was hypocritical because on one hand they'd over sexualize and objectify women at young ages like Britney Spears, but simultaneously they jump at the first opportunity to demonize and blame these women, label them as sluts and sexual deviants for breaking the hearts of innocent teen heartthrobs. Like this is a double standard. Men are treated differently than women. They were and they are now. And I think that reflecting on this is important. In fact, I'd say that self-reflection is necessary because if we don't look back to the past and think about the bad things that we've done, we'd never be able to progress as a society. Like imagine if debate surrounding the treatment of LGBTQ people was just like dismissed and trivialized as cancel culture. Well, we can't look back and think about the way that we treated gays or blacks because that's just cancel culture. I mean, it's really important to look back and learn from our mistakes. Otherwise we'd never progress and that doesn't just apply to social issues. That applies to all types of issues, economic issues, foreign policy issues. If we never looked back at our foreign policy mistakes, we'd never be able to correct our mistakes now or not make those mistakes in the future. But would it be cancel culture to look back at the Iraq war and think, man, that was a really bad decision. George W. Bush was literally lying to all of us by trying to gin up support for a war when there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Is it cancel culture to want to cancel George W. Bush? Furthermore, are there not genuine instances where we should cancel people? I think that George W. Bush, a war criminal, should be canceled. Bill Maher did an address Andrew Cuomo who has three sexual harassment allegations against him. Is it not bad to cancel powerful people who abuse their positions of power? Would it not be bad to cancel someone like Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby? Like if we're talking about cancel culture, I think that it's perfectly reasonable to discuss the parameters. Like who do we apply cancel culture to and what should the ramifications be? But when we're talking about celebrities, I don't care about celebrities. They're rich, they're powerful. And I hate to say it, but nine times out of 10 when celebrities are canceled, they're not actually canceled. In fact, they usually have more opportunities presented to them. They get book deals. They then get to go on social media and talk about how they were canceled. Hell, Kevin Sorbo, he went on Fox News last week because his Facebook page was deleted because he was spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and he was claiming that he's canceled now. So like it's lucrative to claim that you've been canceled. Victimization pays. That's why a lot of people do it. And he also brings up Gina Crino from The Mandalorian because she was fired from Disney for making insensitive social media posts. But what's weird to me is that like he's talking about cancel culture, his message presumably is specifically to anti-SJWs, but yet he's conflating what Disney, a private multimillion dollar company did to something that society does. So who actually is guilty when it comes to canceling? Is it these private companies? Is it Hasbro for canceling Mr. Potato Head by taking the mister off of it and making him gender neutral? Is Disney responsible for canceling Gina Crino? Or is society the ones who need to change here? Because I don't know who you're talking to. You start by talking to the SJWs who we named specifically, but then you cite examples where a company like Disney fired one of their employees. Like if a worker, a normal worker at Walmart made the same posts that she made on social media and was fired, I think that that is bad. We shouldn't fire people and make them lose their livelihood because they say stupid things. But if a multimillionaire celebrity doesn't, I'm sorry, I don't have as much sympathy. You can say in principle, it's still wrong, but I don't have sympathy because she's gonna be okay. In fact, now she is a martyr for the right. Ben Shapiro is now making a movie with her. So I mean, the question is, when we're talking about celebrities, like are they ever really truly canceled? You could say Harvey Weinstein was actually canceled, but isn't that a good thing? And see, this is the problem. Like if you're talking about cancel culture as it relates to normal Americans, working Americans, that's a different story. Because if they lose their jobs, that actually does lead to them getting canceled for lack of a better word because they then lose their livelihoods. But when a celebrity gets canceled, they're still millionaires, they're still powerful. They still get other gigs. He also brings up the bachelor host who defended a contestant's racism. Now again, at the beginning of the segment, he talked about how Republicans are weaponizing this issue, I'm paraphrasing of course, but then he goes on to use the same exact arguments that Republicans use. Here's the thing, there's always going to be talks of political correctness and has it gone too far? You know, are we being a little bit too rigorous in the way that we hold people accountable or too extreme in the way we hold people accountable, rather. And this is always going to be part of political discourse. It's how society grows. And he said it himself, like as human beings, we're constantly growing and learning. And mature people understand humans are continually evolving. So if that's true, which he's right there, wouldn't you argue that this is all part of the process? Sure, you can say that people get a little bit hasty and canceling sometimes, but I mean, this is all part of the process. I don't think it's inherently bad to look back and say, hey, maybe the media mistreated Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake didn't behave appropriately. Maybe he should apologize to her. Like, is this really a bad thing? Aren't there better issues that you could focus on if you genuinely care about cancel culture this much? And again, I understand why Bill Maher from his position cares about cancel culture, but at the same time, I also don't really care that much about him because even though he was canceled, he wasn't canceled in the traditional sense because his show was canceled, but he has a new show on HBO. He is a multi-millionaire. So to me, my response usually is crime in your river. I don't care about celebrities who get canceled. This is gossip. This is tabloid bullshit. This isn't actually substantive. It doesn't actually further political discourse, but what Bill Maher does here is he makes the Republican Party's argument for them who are trying to prop up cancel culture as a serious issue when in actuality, they don't really care about cancel culture. They're trying to cancel people. They're trying to cancel leftists. Why doesn't Bill Maher or Republicans speak out against all of the leftist speakers who are disinvited and banned from college campuses? Why hasn't anyone defended Noam Chomski who's been blacklisted by mainstream media for over a decade now, probably? Why aren't we actually talking about the real instances of cancel culture where we canceled intellectuals and people who actually are insightful and challenge the status quo? We don't do that. We don't actually defend the people who are canceled, who challenge power. We defend the people. And when I say we, I mean anti-SJW YouTubers and Bill Maher to be clear, they don't actually defend the people who are canceled, who challenge the status quo, who challenge the powers that be. But when it comes to, you know, celebrities who get fired from their job at Disney, that's when they're willing to, you know, speak up and sound the alarm. It's just, I would take you more seriously. One, if you were consistent here and spoke to other examples, like examples of people like, you know, Nathan J. Robinson, Mark Lamont Hill, elementary teachers, not signing, you know, pro-Israel loyalty pledges, I would be more inclined to take you seriously if you focused on that and not like celebrity gossip issues as it relates to cancel culture. So I'll leave that there. Bill Maher is now basically an anti-SJW YouTuber and he did post this video to YouTube. So welcome to the club, buddy. You can get your video taken down or demonetized and then you could start a Patreon and you can make the Dave Rubin bucks. Although you're already making that. So I don't even know why you're on this. It's not a grift. Maybe you're just like misled genuinely. Either way, Bill Maher, still not watchable in 2021. Shocker.