On HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher Friday night, Maher showed once again that he is the only late-night comic who is willing to say things his liberal audience probably doesn’t want to hear. In the course of lavishing praise on President Biden, whom he described as sharp, effective, and leading “the most transformative administration since FDR,” he blasted young people for being skeptical of Biden and also for being stupid in general:
America’s a young country [that doesn’t grasp] the most fundamental tradeoff. You’re beautiful when you’re young, wise when you’re old . . . if, as they say, you learn something new every day, it stands to reason that someone who’s logged 10,000 more days is gonna be in general a little wiser. . . . Biden is the right man for this moment precisely because he is old. You know why advertisers in this country love the 18 to 34 demographic? Because it’s the most gullible. Yeah. A third of people under 35 say they’re in favor of abolishing the police. Not defunding. But doing away with a police force altogether. Which is less of a policy position and more of a leg tattoo. Thirty-six percent of Millennials think it might be a good idea to try Communism. But much of the world did try Communism. I know Millennials think that doesn’t count because they weren’t alive when it happened. But it did happen. And there are people around who remember it. Pining for Communism is like pining for Betamax or MySpace. So when you say, ‘You’re old, you don’t get it,’ get what? Abolish the police and the border patrol and capitalism and cancel Lincoln? No, I get it. Problem isn’t that I don’t get what you’re saying, or that I’m old. The problem is that your ideas are stupid. If you say, ‘Let’s eat in the bathroom and s**t in the kitchen,’ yeah, that’s a new idea. But I wouldn’t call it interior design. You think someone 80 is hopeless because they can’t use an iPhone? Maybe the one who’s hopeless is the one who can’t stop using it. You think I’m out of it because I’m not on Twitch? Well, maybe I get Twitch, but I just think people watching other people play video games is a waste of f***ing time. Twenty percent of Gen Z agree with the statement, ‘Society would be better off it all property was owned by the public and managed by the government. And another 29 percent don’t know if that’s a good idea. Here’s who does know: Anyone who wasn’t born yesterday.