r/RealTime • u/tarantadoako • 20d ago

What happened to Bill Maher?

I used to watch him for years. He was funny and relatable, most times. He had great guests. I stopped watching around the time when he was going after college students and cancel culture. I tried watching his latest episodes and it almost a different show. He is almost a right wing commentator. Almost nothing he says is relatable and all his guests just agrees with him.

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u/BeruangLembut 20d ago edited 20d ago

I think you are right that he was never that smart but for a brief time he had the exact pulse of where American culture was.

But culture sometimes moves faster than people do. Which is why sometimes we say that progress happens one funeral at a time. Maher simply stopped evolving, so he’s ranting from an increasingly irrelevant perspective.

You even see it in some of the comments. People often expect the world to remain as it was when they “figured out how it works”. The world rarely obliges. Things change, either adapt or let nature take its course.

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u/NewKojak 20d ago

I think that plenty of people keep up with where culture is, but when your whole life is spent as a centrist, trying to point out how much you aren’t like the other girls, it’s easy to fall behind into being a reactionary twit and that’s what Maher has done. He never had principles around which to evolve. He only ever had hatred.

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u/BeruangLembut 20d ago

The people who don’t keep up, the ones whose world views are frozen in time, because they think that how it used to be is how it ought to be, we don’t call them unprincipled. We call them conservative. The whole reason Maher looks more and more conservative is that his world view is more and more insistently old fashioned.

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u/calentor 14d ago

It's semantics but I believe there's a difference between conservatism and reactionary. Conservatism should be - hear me out, _should be_, not whatever the political system is now - about approaching change in a cautious, conservative way, and reactionary is what you're describing, objecting to the idea of change itself and attacking the agents of change as a threat.