Maher: We’re Lumping in Russian People with Their Government, and ‘If They Weren’t White,’ ‘We Would Call That Racism’ 

During the “Overtime” segment of his “Real Time” show on Friday, Bill Maher argued that Russian people are being unfairly lumped together with the Russian government and “If they weren’t white, I feel like we would call that racism, to lump everybody together.”

Maher said, “Do you think we’re lumping the Russians…too much with their government? I feel like, in this country, what we’re doing now, everything Russian is bad and every Russian is bad. And that might have — first of all, it’s not fair. If they weren’t white, I feel like we would call that racism, to lump everybody together. Not every — I mean, a lot of the Russian people don’t know what’s going on.”

Pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson agreed with Maher’s point and author Max Brooks responded that lumping Russian people with their government is also strategically “unwise. Because what we were very smart about doing in World War II, is we knew the war was going to come to an end and we knew that if we punished all Germans the way we did after World War I, we would back them into a corner. So, we crafted the narrative that you Germans are led astray by Hitler. … We cannot back the Russians, as an entire group, into a corner. If we can separate Putin from the Russians in general, then we don’t only have a victory, we have a post-war plan.”

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