After being annoyed yet again by Bill Maher on last Friday's Real Time - comparing social media criticism by progressives ('the woke') with the Supreme Court's anti-abortion ruling and deeming the former worse, I had to do some Googling. How did Maher mutate into such an anti-lib, anti-progressive buffoon who actually believed an official SC ruling which packed legal sanctions was on a par with some social media criticism? As on Friday night's show -where he argued with WaPo reporter Charlotte Rampell abut assorted vile memes (and whether the spouters ought to face any opprobrium) I felt he was overdoing the iconoclastic stuff. But how did the guy turn from his full-throated monologues against the Right barely 3 years ago, to now vigorously defending their "free speech" rights on social media while shaming the Left?
Maher
again, like so many on the Right, or "center Right", conflates and
confuses harsh criticism (such as directed a few months ago at comic Dave Chapelle)
with harsh sanction meted out by reactionary lawmakers to the point of severe
punishment - such as occurred under Sen. Joe McCarthy and the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). This vicious Right wing political hit machine from the 1940s, 50s, pretty
well destroyed the reputations and careers of hundreds of actors, writers, including Dalton Trumbo, who even had
to serve prison time. Are the 'woke' critics of the Right's minions doing anything like that to them on social media? Of course not!
What really pissed me off is when Ms. Rampell brought up the legal force contingent on the SC Dobbs ruling - taking down Roe v. Wade - and Maher responding with his typical bratsky snark: "Well, abortion doesn't concern me, since I'm a guy and won' get pregnant."
Some targeted Googling led me to a Daily Beast article (What is the Intellectual Dark Web?) by Ben Burgis, who wrote;
"IDW is a group of center-right “anti-woke” pundits informally
known as the IDW (Intellectual Dark Web). At first
glance, that looks like a bizarre transformation. This guy (Maher) was an icon of
the liberal side
of the culture war in the Bush and Obama eras. What happened to him? That
Maher could be a liberal icon in the 2000s and early 2010s is less explained by
his own views than it is by the completely-altered state of America’s political
battle lines.
....The
straight-talking creator of Religulous and
host of a show where Christopher Hitchens didn’t have to hide his scotch in a coffee cup provided some catharsis for anxious secularists. It wasn’t
until a decade had passed and Maher was calling Milo Yiannopoulos a “young, gay, alive Christopher Hitchens”
that some of us started to wonder what Maher actually got out of those
sit-downs with the Hitch. Hitchens
didn’t deserve to be compared to a vapid grifter like
Milo. And it says everything about Maher that he couldn’t tell the difference."
Well, it showed me that while Maher projected the patina of intellect it was actually only shallow, it didn't plumb deeply enough. That showed glaringly in his exchanges with Charlotte Rampell last Friday night. Quietly, with class, she simply put him in his intellectual place, which is to say inferior to hers.
Burgis again (ibid.):
"While
the group has more recently fractured due to disagreements about the 2020
election and the politics of COVID, with the “Intellectual Dark Web” label less
and less in use, “IDW” remains a useful shorthand for a recognizable set of
ideological preoccupations.
In the best
book that’s been written about the group, Against the Web, Michael Brooks makes a compelling case that far from just reacting to
the excesses of performative “wokeness” or expressing legitimate concerns about elements of the Left losing sight of the importance of
free speech, charter members of the IDW like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and
Sam Harris are at their core defenders of traditional hierarchies.
They parlay
their audience’s understandable distaste for “wokeness” and censoriousness into
support for a fundamentally reactionary ideology—one that frames existing
social inequalities not as a result of contingent historical developments that
could be undone at a later stage of history, but as part of an unchanging
natural order."
Think of Ben Shapiro here, who I already skewered over an appearance on Real Time, e.g.
As I wrote in that post:
"this feral looking, fast-talking, closet Nazi (similar to another Nazi wannabe, Stephen Miller), was left frustrated during his appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher. This was after counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance educated him on authoritarianism. The real version, not the phantom "left" form Shapiro manufactured for his forthcoming book, to provide cover for the traitor Trumpists and autocrats everywhere."
But also noting even then Maher's yen to poke equally at the left, i.e.
"Even Maher, not always as quick on the draw as he fancies, fessed up he thought Shapiro's book was about Trump authoritarians, not the left soft, critical version. Here, alas, Maher lapsed into false equivalence with his nonsense "I certainly have made that case myself and woke Twittter has power!" Uh no, Bill, you haven't made any "case" given Twitter is not the same as the destruction and terror of heavy- handed Trump Nazis!"
That and Maher's litany of rants against masking, vaccines and other Covid precautions e.g.
convinced me (and Janice) Maher isn't what he claims to be. We're not alone by any means. Blogger Jaime O'Neill also let loose on Maher, e.g.
"With an ever-increasing sense of unease, I began to notice more
and more things Maher was saying that made me cringe. He began to seem less and
less incisive, far less funny, and Bill Maher himself even began to seem like
not at all a very nice guy. He had always had a tendency to ride particular
hobby horses about a range of things like diet, or his crankiness about
marriage and procreation, but he generally managed to keep the tone light. Now,
he appears one helluva lot less like a youngish rebel and more and more like a
cranky old bastard as he natters on about how awful and spoiled the young
people are nowadays. He books far too many right wingers on his show, and then
treats them with undue regard and deference. He may think he's just being
"fair and balanced" or keepin' it real, but it just doesn't seem to
play that way.
There was a saying I heard often when I was growing up in Illinois. Directed at kids who might have been exhibiting an excess of pride or an over estimation of their own value, such kids were said to be "gettin' too big for their britches." That phrase comes to mind now just about every time I watch an episode of Real Time With Bill Maher."
As for Jordan Peterson, he's another faux intellectual as well as wannabe authoritarian whose position was made crystal clear in a June 16, 2018 WSJ review piece Jordan Peterson and Conservatism’s Rebirth, noting:
"Departing from the prevailing Marxist and liberal doctrines, Mr. Peterson relentlessly maintains that the hierarchical structure of society is hard-wired into human nature and therefore inevitable: “The dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years. It’s permanent.”
Of course, a bunch of deflecting, distracting qualifications and exceptions ensue in the piece to make the reader believe - or want to believe- Peterson is not as hard-wired for proto-fascism as he portrays. But it's all an act. The man is what he is, an admirer of power and "order" however he casts it, i.e. an inbred fascist.
Going back to Burgis, he pretty well ices the notion that Maher is one of the perpetually contrarian IDW gang, with Shapiro and Jordan:
"Bill Maher’s
recent conflation of anti-capitalism with “wokeness” certainly fits Brooks’
description of what the IDW is all about. So does an analogy I remember him
using years ago on Real Time.
The economy needs to be regulated, Maher said, the same way a river might need
a wall to prevent flooding. But trying to change the basic structure of our
economic system would be like
trying to make the river run backwards.
The IDW brand
was always about being anti-Left (while disingenuously clinging to the label of
“liberal”) and basically hostile to social change, without ever quite being
identified with the Trumpist side of the culture war."
But in previous posts I've noted Maher conflates a LOT. Some may be deliberate to emphasize his false equivalence bent - to rate the Left almost as bad or worse than the Right - the rest may simply be intellectual laziness. Such as he demonstrated last Friday night in his table exchanges with Charlotte Rampell. Either way, repeatedly using that shtick has certainly cost him progressive viewers, e.g.
One hopes Maher will get back to his old anti-Right form as we approach the midterms but I'm not holding my breath. For now his IDW DNA is firmly in place and he's not about to be a reverse changeling. And Ben Burgis appears to agree with that,
"Maher is
not wrong when he says that his views haven’t really changed. He was an IDW
kind of guy long before that silly label was invented."
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