On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher said he’s gone after the left a lot recently because they’ve been “inverting things” that liberals stand for by reverting to racial segregation under a new name, and lowering standards due to equity concerns.
Maher said, “[W]hen people say to me, sometimes, boy, you go after the left a lot these days, why? I’m like, because you’re embarrassing me. That’s why I’m going after the left, in a way you never did before. Because you’re inverting things that I — I’m not going to give up on being liberal. … You’re taking children and making them hyper-aware of race in a way they wouldn’t otherwise be. I mean, I saw last night on the football game, Alicia Keys sang, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ which now I hear is called the black national anthem. Now, maybe we should get rid of our national anthem, but I think we should have one national anthem. I think when you go down a road where you’re having two different national anthems, colleges sometimes now have — many of them have different graduation ceremonies for black and white, separate dorms. This is what I mean, segregation. You’ve inverted the idea. We’re going back to that under a different name.”
He later added, “And to the point about inverting what the goals were, I mean, when I was a kid, it was about — I was too young to understand, but my father was telling me John F. Kennedy was a great president because he sent the troops so that black kids could go to school. Because the goal was to have as good of an education for everybody.” Maher then reference Oregon lowering high school graduation standards over equity concerns, “which is, to me, such an insult.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett