In a plea to make 2024 the year of “sanity” — which he says was the #1 hope of people he asked in an informal poll — commentator and comedian Bill Maher proposes that the extremists who get the most attention in our culture aren’t the majority and might be ignored a little bit more often.
Castigating those who huddle on the fringes — the “far ends” — of both the left and right wings politically, Maher asks “How can you suck all the oxygen out of the room and still not get any into your brain?”
The battle for the soul of America isn’t right vs. left. It’s normal vs. crazy. pic.twitter.com/xRDMuJpAGT
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) January 20, 2024
Calling “sane people” the “majority,” Maher enumerates a few things that make him wince when the news comes on, or just when he’s driving around. People driving alone in their cars wearing masks bothers him, though as a libertarian there’s reason to think it shouldn’t.
After all, the whole libertarian notion depends upon the insistence that people can do what they want when they’re alone — and anyway wearing a mask isn’t even close to the weirdest thing people do by themselves. It’s almost as if Maher brings up this conservative bugaboo — masks, ugh — so he can appear to possess equilibrium when he moves on and excoriates the GOP in the next bit, which is of slightly more import.
That is: “Every time a Democrat is president,” Maher says, “the Republicans threaten to tank the world economy by forcing us to take a vote on whether to pay back the money we already spent. No other country does this.”
Maher concludes that “Congress isn’t a deliberative body anymore,” likening it to a “rave without a permit.”
Segueing to the event guaranteed to foil Maher’s wish that 2024 will be the year of “sanity” — the upcoming American presidential election — Maher says “probably the first thing on my end, most people’s list of insanity, is that this guy [Donald Trump] is going to be president again. It feels surreal that we’re in court every day trying to prove Trump wanted to overturn the election while he’s on the campaign trail every day telling everyone they should have overturned the election.”
Maher takes some digs at beleagured Ivy League presidents too, but quickly returns to Trump telling a crowd that “If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot while leaving that store. Shot.” Maher begs people to consider an evidently forsaken middle ground: “socially liberal but not stupid woke, fiscally sane but not cruel.”
