Bill Maher On Spurning The Likes

The TV legend has a new collection of his greatest hits.

Bill needs no introduction, but he’s been the formidable host of HBO’s Real Time for 21 years now, and before that he hosted Politically Incorrect, which ran from 1993 to 2002. He has a new book out, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You — a collection of his best editorials on Real Time. Also check out his podcast, “Club Random,” which he recently expanded into a pod network, Club Random Studios. Bill manages to do all of that and still perform standup on the road — schedule here.

You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on Bill not caving to political correctness after 9/11, and the two of us debating the credibility of the Gospels — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: Bill going to church every Sunday as a kid; his Irish-Catholic dad turning away from the Church after Pope Paul VI; how the left today is bonkers; how Biden is captured by wokeness; the toxicity of the Trump cult; getting his GOP rivals to bend the knee; Ann Coulter’s balls in opposing him; the crisis of mass illegal migration; the dickishness of DeSantis on lab meat and rainbow bridges; his sensible approach to Covid; election deniers; the remarkable progress of legal weed and marriage equality; Bill’s movie Religulous; his admiration for Jesus as a philosopher; Muhammad the invading warrior; slavery in the Bible; the conflicting accounts of the Resurrection; whether Paul was a closeted gay; Christianity starting as a bourgeois religion; the pagan origins of Christian holidays; Richard Dawkins; the rise of the nones; wokeness as a religion; Bronze Age Pervert; Lauren Boebert on church/state; American exceptionalism as Christian heresy; October 7th; the profound illiberalism of Hamas; their Nazi-like tactics; “Hamas wants to commit genocide but can’t — Israel can, but won’t”; Rafah as Dunkirk; Biden’s Morehouse speech; Trump’s insane antics as the ultimate teflon; his humor; wokeness as a gold mine for comedy; comics who cave to PC; Trump’s energy on the trail; and Bill’s grueling book tour offering insight into campaigning.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Nellie Bowles on the woke revolution, Noah Smith on the economy, George Will on Trump and conservatism, Lionel Shriver on her new novel, Elizabeth Corey on Oakeshott, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty; and the great Van Jones! Send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Last week’s episode with Oren Cass elicited the most commentary we’ve had in months. First up, a few dissents over my comments on immigration in a globalized world. A Brit writes:

You seemed to suggest that you have to be white British to not represent a loss to the UK within the context of the reduction in white British Londoners over the last 20 years. Speaking as a mixed-race person — with a white British father and a Mauritian mother, having been born and brought up in London, going to a C of E church and school, reading Thomas Hardy, and watching Carry On and Dad’s Army, amongst several hundred ways that someone may be defined as English — am I to regard myself as something of a loss to the country on the basis of my brown skin?

Your suggestion that this view cannot be regarded as racist is an inversion of the truth. This is not a moral judgement, but a factual one. I realise that mentioning the “R” word offends the political correctness of the right, but let’s try to be objective.

I don’t think non-white Brits represent a “loss” to the UK. What I said is that the speed of the unprecedented mass immigration of the last ten years has so transformed London that it is no longer recognizably the city it only recently was — and that the pace of this change has understandably unnerved people. The recent wave is all foreign-born, and those born somewhere else — not just non-white — now outnumber white British! That’s New York City, not London.

From a listener in New Zealand:

Thank you for a brilliant episode, yet again. I’d like to comment on your exchange with Cass on culture and nationalism — specifically, how cosmopolitan elites fail to understand the isolationist right. I’m a 25-year-old medical student living in Auckland, and my day-to-day experience wholly vindicates the “liberal elite” cosmopolitan vision. Auckland is one of the most diverse cities in the world, and my classes are majority-minority, populated by a decent proportion of Maori and Pasifika students, the usual middle-class whites, but mostly Asian second-generation immigrants whose families came to New Zealand under a very pro-immigration policy upheld by the last few governments.

I believe you mistake the “is” of the populist right’s attitudes towards diversity for an “ought”. My diverse class is not the groundless, meaningless intermix that you, Cass, or Douglas Murray envision. My classmates really do vindicate the “elite” notion of the melting pot; they’re a lovable mix of native beliefs and New Zealand values. They come to class, chat about rugby and exams and Bridgerton, then go home to a Hindi- or Chinese-speaking home, to Muslim prayers or Sikh temples.

The best part of my day is when those worlds interlink. Upon learning I was Jewish, a Korean classmate said how much she loves Shabbat candle-lighting ceremonies. Arguments rage among my white classmates about where to find the best Biangbiang noodles in town. I get to walk into the streets of Auckland and have an entire world of cuisine, products, entertainments, exercise routines, fashions, and indulgences drawn from the cacophonous intercultural mix that our immigrants brought with them. Are you seriously telling me that I should trade that for the monotony of the parochial, small-town, European settler-culture in which I was raised?

It’s true that if I walk down Dominion Road — the unofficial Chinatown — I might go two or three blocks without hearing a word of English, similar to your comment about London. But this doesn’t give me a moment of pause, because I know that those non-English speakers work unimaginably hard for the economy I enjoy, and their children will be Kiwis who will play without a moment’s hesitation with my own kids, with the added intrigue and delight of cultural intermixing.

Let me ask you this: on an absolute basis, what would you prefer? A world that welcomes other cultures and races with open arms — that maybe, yes, has a mixture of different languages and cultural values, but in which all broadly get along, and who generally all integrate within a single generation? Or would you prefer the populist right’s vision of cultural isolationism, where other-cultured folk are kept out and in-group loyalty is prized above everything else? Why are you prizing and fetishizing the whingeing of the parochial right over the experiences of so many urban middle-class folks like me and my classmates who cherish the rewards of globalization?

Yes, some people in small towns or working-class communities have missed out, but I promise you that nobody is keeping them out. They value in-group loyalty and ethnic traditionalism over wider possibilities, and that’s okay. If they want to recapture a sense of community, then they can go to church, or restart that am-dram society that went defunct. They can try a game of football, or line-dancing, or just get the fuck off Facebook.

If you’re a conservative, then you believe in the power of individuals to autonomously shape their lives for the better. I think the rural working class can and should do this, and my lifestyle and that of my peers is not part of some invidious global conspiracy to prevent this. Building up rural and working-class communities should not mean tearing down ours.

Thank you for the hard work of the Dish and the wonderful conversations — I really appreciate it — and I hope this can spark some constructive conversation.

P.S. My favourite Dishcast episode of all time was with David Frum. That was some time ago now, so maybe he could back on for a pre-election update? In my opinion he is the most articulate, intelligent, and capable commentator working today.

I share your enthusiasm for life in a multicultural city. But I am not blind to the social, political, and psychological consequences of massive, fast demographic change. I also think nations need a coherent connection between present and past, and benefit from the cultural cohesion, and the social trust that comes with that. I think our elites just ignored all of that in the globalization era, and have the same reaction to the hinterlands that you do: get over it and get your lives together. Objectively there has been a great replacement, even though it was intended benignly and naively. People don’t like feeling replaced. Which is why the populist far right is ascendant everywhere.

This next listener looks to immigration when it comes to the US:

In your conversation with Oren Cass, once again you hammer the topic of immigration in a way that really gets on my nerves. I share your dismay over the inability of many progressive Democrats to acknowledge the virtues of patriotism, but your “othering” of “they” gets tedious. Plenty of Democrats consider themselves patriotic, and if the US faced an urgent military threat, I’m confident that an unexpected wellspring of patriotism would magically appear.

Second, while indeed immigration to the US generates problems that the Dem establishment has difficulty acknowledging (for political reasons), I consider your repeated claims about national identity wrong-headed and misinformed. England (and indeed the large majority of countries) are true nation-states, whose very identity is rooted on the shared ancestry and genealogy of its citizens. The US is different. Importantly different. Fundamentally different. The US constitution defines birthright citizenship — a principle widespread in the Western hemisphere but almost nonexistent elsewhere. No “white” resident of the US can trace their ancestry to this country for more than five centuries. Indeed, we ARE a nation of immigrants, from very many countries.

The US speaks a version of English, and has incorporated many customs of 17th-18th century Britain, but the UK is a really bad model of this country today, especially with regard to immigration. Please stop treating attitudes in the two countries as equivalent.

P.S. Unlike Matt Yglesias, I’m a paid subscriber.

Another adds, “Maybe we get 50+ Dishheads on a GoFundMe to give $1 each and shame Yglesias. (P.S. I am a fan of Matt.)”

Yes, the US is unique. But it’s also true that until the 1965 Immigration Act, the overwhelmingly majority of immigrants were white Europeans — and even they were often regarded with suspicion and animosity. The mass, non-white, non-European immigration wave is entirely a product of our lifetimes — and unimaginable until the late 20th century. And what makes this far more damaging is that the official US policy is not, as it once was, assimilating new immigrants into an American identity; it’s about celebrating difference and multiculturalism and the dissolution of a single American identity. Any society would react strongly to that. Which is why we had — and probably will have — Trump as president.

Next up, listeners dissent over the economic aspects of the Cass episode. The first:

I always enjoy your podcasts and your writing, but I thought you gave Oren Cass a free pass on the most absurd set of left-adjacent, central-planning principles I’ve heard from a “conservative” in 30 years. This guy sounded like an economic advisor in the Clinton or Obama administration: hates free markets, hates free trade, hates small government. You never really challenged him, which is very unlike you.

Well, I just don’t believe that the neoliberal economics I once supported are appropriate to our current social and political reality; and I don’t think economic theories are true forever and everywhere. But maybe I should have pushed back harder. And if I don’t challenge a guest enough, listeners will fill the void, like this one:

I forced myself to listen to the episode with Oren Cass because I think it’s important to hear out opposing ideas. I remain opposed to the right-wing turn toward Elizabeth Warren-ism. Cass sounds sincere, but incredibly wrong. We have never experienced government policy based on “free market fundamentalism.” Sign me up for a party based around that. That both parties now embrace tariffs is as discouraging as voters embracing an amoral asshat like Trump. Our free markets have always been shadowed with regulations, tariffs, and favored industries.

Marco Rubio has no more ability to choose a favored industry than Warren does. It’s hilarious that Cass thinks Biden is just picking the wrong industries. No one can pick the right ones. Trying to do so stifles innovation and opportunity. JD Vance was on TV just yesterday claiming tariffs are not inflationary:

Maybe Cass looks at trade-offs, but voters do not. Talk to a Trump voter and you will typically find they think we can have cheap consumer goods made in the USA by high-wage workers. It is a fantasy that stands in the way of growth. Or, if they are like some of my relatives, those voters think they can somehow economically punish the affluent without hurting themselves. We will all suffer together in a Steve Bannon economy.

Seventy percent of US exports are manufactured goods. The median manufacturing salary is  ~$66K. US manufacturing is not in decline. I am touring a new solar-panel plant in rural Georgia in a couple weeks — not because of Biden, but because Governor Kemp has been busy recruiting green-related manufacturing to the state, selling them on Georgia’s light regulatory touch and low taxes, right out of the Reagan/Thatcher playbook.

Yes, there are issues with China. TTP was the best way to combat them; attack bad trade with free trade. But Trump was too dumb to realize it, just like he’s too dumb to see a lot of things. That anti-trade sentiments are thriving in the horseshoe of politics is maddening.

You need to have Scott Lincicome on to provide some balance, especially given the lack of pushback to Cass. Lincicome can speak to the sunny story of free markets.

More pushback from a listener:

First off, your callout of Yglesias was hilarious. (I’ve been consistently reading him because of you, since you transitioned the Dish from Time magazine to The Atlantic back in 2007). You should have threatened to rename the Yglesias Award!

I’ve encountered Oren Cass before, so I knew he was going to misrepresent neoliberalism, (neo)classical economics, and “market fundamentalism.” I was, however, disappointed that you seemed to largely embrace his way of thinking as promising, even though you could point out the failures of the left trying out various strains of illiberal socialism/collectivism/mercantilism that you lived through. My primary fear is that we will be worse if the right does anti-neoliberalism, because so much of the left is already intrinsically on board with being anti-market and anti-freedom. I never thought I would miss the Tea Party, but here we are.

You remarked, “When decades of sclerotic regulation have piled up, deregulation can be important.”

That is more true today than it has ever been in many critical areas. Just look at healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and higher education — all areas of massive government intervention gumming things up. Look at unions killing port efficiency, and the Jones Act killing the US merchant fleet and domestic shipbuilding capacity. Look at Cost Disease Socialism and subsidizing demand while restricting supply. Look at the impossibility of building basic infrastructure at any reasonable timeframe or cost. Look at zoning strangling housing production. It’s not market failure or globalization; it’s policy failures.

The illiberal, mercantilist approach that Cass wants to take with tariffs and industrial policy is trying to increase government intervention to solve problems largely caused by government intervention. It will not go well because it already hasn’t.

The right answer to improve prosperity for Americans across the board is deregulation, freedom, and supply-side economics, as well as an abundance agenda and YIMBY reforms. (Noah Smith could cover a lot of this for your upcoming episode, though he is a wee bit too optimistic about industrial policy.) Talk to Yglesias or Tyler Cowen or Garrett Jones or (shudder) Ezra Klein about how to actually improve policy, not the false hopes of tariffs and barriers to commerce.

Overall, Cass has an incoherent critique of economics as a field and its influence on public policy. He spends a lot of time making (often justified) criticisms of “high economics,” which focused too much on big data, fancy statistics, and policy interventions; and it fell victim to many of the ills of the Replication Crisis (which affects the social sciences writ large).

But then Cass also derides “market fundamentalists,” and if he’s referring to the GMU/Cato/Reason/Niskanen free-market types, they also tend to dislike “high economics” — when they think it has gotten away from freedom and market fundamentals. Cass acts like behavioral economics hasn’t had a massive impact for decades (in an anti-market direction), or that Public Choice Theory was never conceived. I’m not sure if he’s willfully ignorant or selectively blind, but he’s definitely straw-manning the current state of affairs and his free-market opponents on the right.

Biden very well may lose this election because of inflation and high interest rates, which result from all of the massive, inefficient, inflationary programs he’s pushed. He’s trying to be an FDR or Johnson, when we need a Carter or Clinton. The totally predictable, self-defeating outcome of his industrial policy is that we can’t build green infrastructure because environmental regulations don’t allow basically any infrastructure to be built, but Biden will light money on fire instead of doing major permit-reform beforehand.

Why do you let Cass attack global trade by focusing almost entirely on China —where there are valid fair-play and geopolitical concerns — and not all the benefits from, say, trade with Japan or any other ally? How much did the “China shock” really impact US manufacturing trends, relative to automation, unions driving up costs, and the burden of regulations? China is a hard case where reasonable people can disagree, and the optimists about political reform were wrong, but that hardly invalidates “globalization” overall. Likewise, there’s immigration and then there’s chaos.

Also, how did AI and automation never come up in this conversation? Things are about to get very weird, and Cass is operating like it’s 1995. And the fertility crisis seems relevant when discussing immigration rates; the US is going to be way better off than its peers for the next while because we have more youths.

I’ll sign off here by saying I’ve been a huge fan since I was in high school, and you’ve had more influence on my thinking than anyone else (particularly because I got to Yglesias and Sam Harris through you). Keep up your cranky nonconformism, even if you’re sometimes wrong about economics and god.

Thanks for that thorough airing of the alternative view. One more listener on the Cass pod:

You don’t know how much an offhand comment of yours meant to me. This past Sunday, my wife and I were driving back to Colorado from having moved one of our sons into an apartment in Saint Louis, where he’s starting a new job. We were listening to your podcast with Oren Cass, which was great. The part that hit home was early on, when you were talking about backgrounds. You mentioned your university mates in England who had gone into banking/finance, and, while they had made a lot of money, “they had been bored for 40 years, and had hardly ever seen their families.”

When my wife heard that, she turned to me with wide eyes.

You see, back in 1988, I was living in London, working in the City, and my boss, who was in from New York, wanted to take me out to some of his favorite pubs. (Not my first brush with death, but certainly the most powerful.) And it caused me to face up to the reality that, while I was already successful, I was already bored to tears and saw before me a future that would make me both rich and miserable.

So in 1989, I switched to management consulting, and I’ve been intellectually challenged and happy ever since. To be sure, it wasn’t costless — my then-wife worked at Goldman and later became a partner. I thought I was out of my mind. Needless to say, that marriage didn’t last.

But I’ve lived all around the world since, and I’m now happily married for almost 30 years with four wonderful children. When I look at my peers’ lives (I’m heading to my 40th HBS reunion in September), I have no regrets. The saddest moment for me was reading the obit of a classmate who died too young — a successful PE guy, but estranged from his wife and kids after a very ugly and acrimonious divorce. His obit focused on the great deals he did. It was sad beyond words.

Back in the car last Sunday, as my wife and I dodged thunderstorms driving across Kansas, she said to me, “I never knew what to make of your story. Now I do.” So thank you. As my dad always said, you never know the impact your actions and words are having on other people’s lives.

Next up, a reader responds to last week’s column, “Gay And Lesbian Independence Day”:

I know you get some criticism for going on and on about gender. But I am one reader who is grateful for your relentless focus on the harm being done to children in the name of an ideology that makes no sense. Thank you for being one of few public voices in the US to do this so compassionately.

P.S. I sent your column to Jet London, who was really touched that you linked to her video. I’ll suggest she write to you directly.

Another reader highlights a Canadian leader standing up for kids in the face of transqueer ideology:

My husband and I moved to Calgary from Bend, Oregon at the end of March. So far, we are really impressed by Alberta’s conservative premier, Danielle Smith.  Recently she’s taken a lot of heat over legislation banning the transing of children.  If you haven’t already, you should watch this video of her in its entirety:

Her compassionate tone and pledge for more support are such a welcome reprieve from the way that many American conservatives address trans issues.

Another reader quotes me:

“And I ask myself: if I had been offered that solution [of “gender-affirming care”] would I have taken it? And the answer is maybe yes.”

Add me to the list, Andrew. I’m your age, and I was raised in a small town in North Dakota by parents who were bewildered to have a boy who was a “sissy.” They would say, “What do you mean you like to skate but don’t want to play hockey?!” I was “treated” for gender dysphoria in kindergarten in 1971. I could tell you about the BS protocol — basically straight-up Skinner behavior mod. I got candy if I didn’t do anything effeminate that day, plus a sticker on a sheet. When I achieved so many stickers, I got a bigger piece of candy.

Ugh, you have no idea how damaging this was. I was onto to them, because I wasn’t an idiot, but the unintended consequences were devastating. It wasn’t just that it taught me to deny myself to reach for anything that felt natural to me and mutated my desire “gene”. It was that I now knew that my parents thought of me as a problem to be fixed, that I was an embarrassment to them. After this “treatment,” I went from an extremely happy, free-range kid who turned cartwheels down the sidewalk to a sedentary, fat, depressed couch potato. At that point, I would have gladly taken on a trans identity.

Then puberty hit. And for the life of me, I could not comprehend how I ever found a Barbie Doll fascinating. I just wanted to watch the hockey game and finally get some piano lessons that I had been asking for for years. (My parents wouldn’t let me do anything remotely girlish-seeming for fear of “pushing me over the edge,” lol.)

Yep, I’m gay. I was married for 25 years to an academic, and now a widower. And I play Sondheim at my piano every fucking day.

Parents can be very selfish and undermining in what they think is best for their children. But I think the worst damage comes when they think they’re “helping.” Most of the time it IS just a phase.

Amen. And if the damage from psychological conversion therapy can be slowly repaired, a child’s endocrine and reproductive system can’t.

This next reader can relate to a searing childhood memory I wrote about:

I had to write you because your experience with your grandmother and brother resonates so strongly with a similar experience I had. I must have been about ten. It was soon after Christmas at my father and stepmother’s home. They had given me a chemistry set, and I had left it unopened all day while I read a book. They had a son, my half-brother, who was about two years old. My father asked my stepmother if I had played at all with the chemistry set, and she told him I hadn’t even opened it. He responded, “Maybe we should give it to Billy — he’s a REAL boy.”

I still remember how deeply it hurt, even though I’m 73 now. And by the way, I’m a straight guy with a lot of traits that some might call “effeminate.” (I’m a poet.)

Ugh. From a young reader:

I’m openly gay, 15 years old, and homeschooled with the rest of my family. They are very accepting of me and always find new ways to show their support (no matter how annoying). And I am graced to have no issues with homophobia in my town.

I wanted to write you because I was flabbergasted by the relatability of the “Gay and Lesbian Independence Day” piece that my mom sent to me. It feels great to read someone who feels the same way I do about this situation.

Because I am gay, I naturally want to find people like me — whether to just make friends, or maybe get a boyfriend. However, I find myself surrounded by a plethora of “trans” and “non-binary” girls, and almost no gay or lesbian teens my age. I often complain to my mom that they are “ruining my life,” and that all of the real gay teens are hiding from people like them. It almost feels that every teenage girl I know is something other than a girl. Some claim to be bisexual, some are she/theys, and some are they/thems. It annoys me because I feel that the majority of these girls are only claiming to be bisexual, non-binary, or trans because they want to feel special.

They also try to impress their beliefs on people. They make their beliefs and “identity” their whole personality, and if you don’t believe in, say, pro-choice, then you hate women. This has led me to have a fear of visiting LGBTQ clubs.

I’m worried that if I try to put myself out there, I will be met with a group of non-binary and trans girls and no gay teens. About two years ago I signed up for a queer history class online, and when I went to the first meeting, every single person there was a trans/nonbinary girl. For the majority of the class, we didn’t even learn much about queer history. Instead, the participants talked mainly about their suicide attempts, depression, and eating disorders.

Of course, I have no problem whatsoever with how these people feel. I definitely believe that some of them truly feel that they are trans or non-binary, and I respect who they want to be. But it’s hard to be friends with the majority of them.

About two years ago, I decided to go to a LGBTQ summer camp. Before I signed up, my brother went on a reconnaissance mission to see who was there. Unfortunately, yet again, my dream to finally meet some real gay teens my age was crushed when he returned with the news that he couldn’t find a single one, and that it appeared to be mostly trans girls.

I feel lonely. Where are all the gays?

In hiding from the transqueers, I suspect. I honestly think that the trans queer movement has been devastating to young gays and lesbians, and to their healthy development. If I were a gay kid today, the gender stuff would keep me in the closet for a long time. But I also believe that gay men and lesbians will ultimately prevail against this gender bullshit, and find ourselves again. We deserve and need our own spaces, and our own communities. Hordes of confused and ideologically-driven young women have killed gay spaces and are killing a health gay and lesbian identity.

Thanks as always for the dissents and other emails, and you can send yours to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

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