Column: Donald Trump Blinded Bill Maher To The Left's Insanity

Have you ever wondered how some people -- those with whom you disagree politically but whom you respect as critical and sane thinkers -- could go along with the woke left's vision of America? How could they support public schools that separate children as oppressed and oppressors and that challenge their biological sex? How can they participate in a corporate system that rewards victimhood over merit? How can otherwise normal people openly promote or simply ignore such dangerous policy ideas and the destruction of American institutions?

The answer is Donald Trump. Trump blinded liberals, including Bill Maher, to what has been happening on their own team for years.

Last Friday, Maher returned to HBO for the 20th season of Real Time. America has changed since Maher first launched his show twenty years ago. The America of 2022 would hardly be recognizable to the America of 2002. Yet Maher's critics say he's the one who has changed, especially in the past year.

For most of 2021, Maher made headlines by ridiculing the progressive left -- a swift turnaround from his previous act of convincing the country that the right had aligned itself with an orange fatso who answers to Vladimir Putin.

During the show's season premiere, Maher declared that he'd no longer abide by the Democrats' COVID response commands.

"I don't want to live in your paranoid world anymore, your masked paranoid world. You know, you go out, it's silly now. You know, you mask, you have to have a card, you have to have a booster. They scan your head, like you're a cashier and I'm a bunch of bananas. I'm not bananas. You are," Maher told his crowd.

"And what the fuck is the use of a booster shot?" Maher asked in a preview of the new season. "Because I will never get a booster shot."

Maher's comments triggered the very people he mainly agreed with prior to 2021, people like Whoopi Goldberg, who spends her days screaming on The View even though she has no appreciable broadcasting skills. Maher is adamant that Goldberg and others like her are the ones who have changed, that they went further left while he has stayed moderate.

He may be right about that, but unfortunately, he didn't notice the shift until Trump left the White House. Maher hasn't recently turned into a conservative, as blue-checks claim. His disdain for the GOP remains the same. He's an atheist, he's pro-choice, and he supports the Affordable Care Act and increasing the minimum wage.

But when Trump exited the White House last January, Maher finally exited his echo chamber. He had to. Content creators like Maher had to reinvent themselves to remain relevant post-Trump. And sometime during the reinvention process, Maher realized that the left had turned into a sadistic group determined to divide us based on beliefs, skin color and vaccination status.

Better late than never, I guess.

Trump blinded Maher to what was happening right in front of him, even as his Real Time guests promoted BLM, advocated for defunding the police and tried to censor those who disagreed with them. Trump distracted Maher from the real racists, rioters and science deniers. Trump diverted him from the risks of children perpetually in masks, an economy indefinitely shut down and the constant fear of a virus made in a lab in China.

Now, Maher sees it all.

He actually began to see it when he witnessed what happened in blue states last year. In addition to rampant drug use, crime, and shuttered local businesses, blue state residents began to grow sad and resentful. They lost their sense of humor. Nothing is funny in New York, California or Illinois anymore. In these states, everything is offensive and dire. These people are miserable and openly invite their leaders to pile on more misery.

"I travel in every state now, back on the road, and the red states are a joy and the blue states are a pain in the ass for no reason," Maher said in 2021.

He's right, and Democrat voters have no one to blame but themselves. They certainly shouldn't blame Maher for calling them out. Imagine you fell asleep in 2015 then woke up in 2021 to see the Twitter pile-ons, the attacks against previous generations of Americans and the scumbags burning down cities with the approval of media corporations. You'd probably react like Maher has, even if you voted for Barack Obama twice.

The woke movement didn't emerge in response to Trump, but the country normalized the idea because of him. Trump was so polarizing that he turned moderate liberals into hateful pitch-fork carriers on social media. Though he may have over-indexed the support for the progressive left's vision of America, Trump also frustrated moderates who would otherwise oppose the leftward lurch. Trump certainly contributed to the problem, but the woke were more than willing to feed off the red meat he gave them. And they grew and grew and grew.

The good news is that Maher's about-face indicates that the country may not have changed as much as we fear. You probably know someone like Maher. Perhaps your neighbor down the road is now less distraught about Russian collusion than he was three years ago, and he has also gained a healthy suspicion about medical experts who fantasize about a recurring COVID vaccination regimen. In other words, he realizes that the woke have become a cartoon. The whole scenario would be funny if they weren't so destructive.

"When what you're doing sounds like an Onion headline, stop," Maher advised liberals last year.

We're there. In fact, we've been living in an Onion-like world since at least late 2016. After four years of distracting himself with Donald Trump, Bill Maher has finally woken up to a nightmare that is partly his own creation.

Maher once aligned himself with the unelected public figures who have made a mockery of American culture. He did more than his fair share of degrading American culture once upon a time too. You know, way back in 2020.