HBO host Bill Maher didn’t hold back during his latest episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, delivering a scathing critique of the Democratic Party for “doubling down” on the same strategies that contributed to their recent election defeat.
In a pointed monologue, Maher accused some Democrats of being “stupid,” criticized others for being overly liberal, and dismissed claims that Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to President-elect Donald Trump was due to racism or sexism.
“Someone must tell the usual suspects on the far left that the saying is, ‘When you’re in a hole, stop digging.’ Not ‘keep digging.’ Talk about doubling down on what got you f—ed in the first place,” Maher said.
He went on to mock a common liberal saying: “Even the one concession I’ve heard a few people on the losing side offer—that liberals should stop saying that Trump voters are stupid—comes with a kind of unspoken parentheses. ‘We know they are stupid, just don’t say it.’”
Maher didn’t spare Democrats from his critique, calling out their own failings. “I got bad news for you, they don’t have a monopoly on stupid,” he remarked. “You wear Queers for Palestine T-shirts, and masks two years after the pandemic ended. And you can’t define ‘woman’—I mean, ‘person who menstruates.’ You’re the Teachers Union education party, and you’ve turned schools and colleges into a joke. You just lost a crazy contest to an actual crazy person.”
He continued his takedown, accusing Democrats of losing touch with reality: “You love to speak truth to power, and we always should, but you have completely lost the ability to speak truth to bulls–t.”
Maher also linked the Democratic Party’s focus on “wokeism” to Harris’ struggles on the campaign trail. “The Democratic polling firm, Blueprint, told Democrats months ago that Black voters, a.k.a. their supposedly liberal base, were more likely to find the president too liberal than too conservative,” Maher said. “They also found that voters didn’t just want Harris to distance herself from Biden, they wanted her to distance herself from what they believe the entire Democratic Party has become—a Portlandia sketch.”
He went on to compare Democrats to “a bunch of privileged mean girls complaining about privilege and trying to make ‘fetch’ happen.”
Finally, Maher rejected the notion that Harris’ defeat was due to her race or gender. “What a shocker that the people who see everything through the lens of race and sex see their election loss as a result of racism and sexism,” he quipped. “Yes, if only we weren’t so irredeemably unenlightened, we would have elected a Black president by now. Oh what, we did? Oh, right, and then re-elected him. Maybe you missed it because it wasn’t on TikTok.”
Addressing claims of sexism, Maher pointed to history: “Hillary got three million more votes than Trump, which in a normal country would be called a victory. It wasn’t 21st-century sexism that prevented a woman from becoming president, it was the Electoral College.”
You can watch Maher’s “New Rule” segment from Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher above and stream the full episode on Max.