Bill Maher had Charlie Kirk on his Club Random podcast.
Originally I was going to post just a snippet of it, but that seems to have been deleted from YouTube, so here’s the whole thing:
I just wanted to highlight this:
Charlie Kirk: “We we have different jihadis that want to kill me. The purple-haired jihadis. The woke guys.”
Bill Maher: “They want to kill me just as bad.”
CK: “You’ve been very outspoken on the woke stuff.”
BM: “Just the way, within a religion, they hate their own apostates more, I would say they hate me more, because I’m supposed to get on the short bus to crazy town with them, and I won’t.”
BM: “I feel like there’s liberal and woke are two completely different things.” That’s certainly true when it comes to classical liberalism, the kind that came out of the enlightenment. But progressives abandoned that kind of liberalism a long, long time ago. FDR was a big proponent of the censorship Maher says he decries, and the post-Port Huron Statement New Left has seldom shied away from trying to silence dissidents and opponents. If the “good liberals” had actually attempted to stop the woke from taking over the Democratic Party one cancel culture issue at a time, then we might be having a different conversation, but they didn’t, many because they were too afraid of being labeled racists. They always hated Republicans too much to breach the “no enemies on the left” dictum, so now the Democratic Party is the party of men in women’s bathrooms and mass importation of illegal alien criminals. Maher just wasn’t paying enough attention to it while it happened.
BM: “Woke is something completely different. It’s very often the opposite of it. You know, liberalism is let’s live in a colorblind society. That’s the goal. Woke’s goal is we see race everywhere.” Bill, there’s only one party pushing a colorblind society, and it’s not the Democrats. Indeed, it’s been that way at least since Reagan. Democrats have long been the party of Affirmative Actions and quotas.
BM: “Liberal is a two-state solution. Woke is river to the sea.” The Democratic Party’s ideological core has been institutionally hostile to Israel since at least the Six-Day War. That hostility was plainly visible on college campuses in the 1980s. Well, guess what? All those keffiyeh-wearing red diaper babies are now firmly in control of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy establishment. Social justice warriors view Israelis as the ultimate white colonial oppressors and Palestinians as the ultimate victims, and therefore Hamas gets imbued with absolute moral authority no matter how many Israeli women they rape and how many Jewish babies they decapitate. Again, these trends have been visible in the Democratic Party for a long time for anyone looking for them. Maher obviously didn’t.
BM: “You got off the F train. You fell asleep and you got off 20 stops too far. And don’t blame me for that .” We don’t blame the Bill Mahers of the world for that, but we do blame them for not pulling the emergency cord until they were 18 or 19 stops down the line, instead of four or five.
“The Short Bus To Crazy Town” is a great phrase to describe where the Democratic Party is going today. It’s great that Maher has finally recognized it. But conservatives noticed these trends a long, long time ago and were ridiculed by the MSM (and the Bill Mahers of the world) for pointing it out.
Maher styles himself an “Enlightenment” liberal. Kirk, by contrast, seems to identify with Christianity/religious authority.
Religion, by nature *must* be intolerant because it has a stake in particular truth claims. Religion cannot tolerate error without losing its unique distinction as a purveyor of God’s revelation to man.
Voltaire is The Godfather of Enlightenment liberalism. He objected to religious authority primarily because of its intolerance and believed religious faith held value only so long as it was useful to man in attaining his ends.
Man must be autonomously free to chose those ends. Religious intolerance is an impediment to autonomous man. So, rather than man being subject to religious constraints, religious authority must be restrained from frustrating man’ plans and purposes.
Voltaire could never have imagined that his Enlightenment liberalism would produce “wokeness”, which is no less intolerant than the repressive societal elements he decried.
So Maher finds himself distanced by Christianity and the illiberal sentiments of his ideological allies alike. Voltaire sought to cut out a sphere where he could function autonomously but his heirs find themselves alienated and abandoned by their own ilk.
There is community in the Fellowship of Christ, Bill. Perhaps it is time for you to put aside your autonomy in exchange for love and acceptance by His followers.
“‘The Short Bus To Crazy Town’ is a great phrase to describe where the Democratic Party is going today.”
If the antiSemitism of Candace Owens, the Christian nationalism of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the formulaic econometrics of Peter Navarro is in any way indicative of where the Republican Party is going today, we may overtake the Democrat bus on the road to Crazy Town.
Maher styles himself an “Enlightenment” liberal. Kirk, by contrast, seems to identify with Christianity/religious authority.
Religion, by nature *must* be intolerant because it has a stake in particular truth claims. Religion cannot tolerate error without losing its unique distinction as a purveyor of God’s revelation to man.
Voltaire is The Godfather of Enlightenment liberalism. He objected to religious authority primarily because of its intolerance and believed religious faith held value only so long as it was useful to man in attaining his ends.
Man must be autonomously free to chose those ends. Religious intolerance is an impediment to autonomous man. So, rather than man being subject to religious constraints, religious authority must be restrained from frustrating man’ plans and purposes.
Voltaire could never have imagined that his Enlightenment liberalism would produce “wokeness”, which is no less intolerant than the repressive societal elements he decried.
So Maher finds himself distanced by Christianity and the illiberal sentiments of his ideological allies alike. Voltaire sought to cut out a sphere where he could function autonomously but his heirs find themselves alienated and abandoned by their own ilk.
There is community in the Fellowship of Christ, Bill. Perhaps it is time for you to put aside your autonomy in exchange for love and acceptance by His followers.
“‘The Short Bus To Crazy Town’ is a great phrase to describe where the Democratic Party is going today.”
If the antiSemitism of Candace Owens, the Christian nationalism of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the formulaic econometrics of Peter Navarro is in any way indicative of where the Republican Party is going today, we may overtake the Democrat bus on the road to Crazy Town.