Democrats Have a Bill Maher Problem
Por Luca GoldMansour — The Nation » Article
/
October 8, 2026
Democrats Have a Bill Maher Problem
Establishment Democrats obsessing over Hasan Piker’s every move seem to have no issue talking to Maher, despite his decades of open bigotry.
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Bill Maher and Michigan Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin on a March 2026 episode of Real Time With Bill Maher.
(HBO / YouTube)
This year’s midterm elections have been dominated by debates about whether or not Democrats should associate with popular Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
The streamer, who is an ardent supporter of Palestinian freedom and dignity, has increasingly lent his platform to progressive challengers running in Democratic primaries. In March, now-Democratic nominee for the Senate in Michigan Abdul el Sayed chose to campaign with Piker, prompting a disingenuous moral panic that persists to this day. The panic is ostensibly related to a list of Piker’s past comments that his detractors claim were misogynistic, antisemitic, and anti-American.
The veracity of the accusations against Piker is questionable, to put it charitably. But while pundits and politicians can’t stop talking about every syllable Piker utters, there’s a truly unrepentant bigot whom establishment Democrats seem to have no problem hanging around with: talk show host, podcaster, and self-described comedian Bill Maher.
Maher’s hatefulness is a matter of extensive public record. For instance, he has a long history of transphobia—part of his persona as a soldier against the supposed hegemony of wokeness. Maher once called trans women who use the women’s bathroom “weirdos peeing” the same week that then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded Obama-era protections for trans students to use the school bathrooms of their choice. He also agreed with Real Time guest Milo Yiannopoulos that “women and girls should be protected from having men who are confused about their sexual identities from their bathrooms,” a perverse insinuation that trans people are more likely to engage in sexual violence, when in fact they are more likely to be the victims of it. And he found himself siding with Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2022, claiming that more young people were openly identifying as trans because “it’s trendy.”
Maher is an equally ardent Islamophobe. In 2014, Maher claimed on his show that Islam “is the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.” (That comment famously drew a rebuke from none other than Ben Affleck.) Just this May, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, condemned Maher for comments he made on his HBO show Real Time that they said “downplayed growing anti-Muslim hate.”
Maher, while discussing the supposed rise in antisemitism in America, claimed that the rise in Islamophobia was less dangerous. Maher conceded that MAGA Republican congressman and virulent racist Randy Fine should be condemned for saying, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” But he followed that by saying it’s “not the same as ‘they need to be nuked and let’s exterminate them.’”
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During a congressional hearing last year, Representative Fine did in fact call for the “destruction” of all “mainstream Muslims.” And earlier in the year, he took to Fox News to suggest that the US should nuke Gaza, invoking the use of nuclear weapons against Japan in World War II. This all comes in the context of an actual—not rhetorical—Israeli campaign of annihilation in Gaza, a majority-Muslim territory, where the equivalent of two atomic bombs was dropped by Israel in just the first month of the now-three-year-old genocide.
Last but certainly not least, Maher is a passionate denier of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. His latest expression of this fanaticism came last month on Real Time, in the wake of the popular outcry against Ed Sheeran’s decision to drop Macklemore from his tour for his on-stage support for Palestinian liberation.
Maher, the purported free-speech warrior, didn’t take issue with a consortium of stadium-owning pro-Israel billionaires using their disproportionate clout to muzzle dissent against an ongoing genocide. No, the 70-year old comedian worth an estimated $140 million decided the “kids” have it wrong—as do the “morally confused” Democratic politicians and “clueless celebrities” who share their views.
“Nowhere has this moral confusion become more obvious than in a place called Gaza,” Maher said. “A little strip of land that was not part of the original Israel, but they won in a war launched against them, but then gave back, gave back as a peace gesture–did they tell you that part on TikTok, kids?” (Maher should know that it’s the United Nations and International Court of Justice, not TikTok, that say the Gaza Strip has been illegally occupied by Israel, without interruption, since 1967.)
“Gaza equals genocide is a lie, an easily provable lie,” Maher went on. “And the fact that so many prominent Democrats go along with it is, to me, the party’s worst moment since they undid Reconstruction after the Civil War. Democrats are policing their candidates really hard on this issue. Say it—say it’s a genocide. Say it.”
Maher also encourages similarly horrifying comments about Gaza from his guests—such as the infamous moment in 2025 when Van Jones joked, “If you are a young person, you open up your phone and all you see is ‘dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby—Diddy—dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby.”
One would think that a party that declares itself concerned about associating with extremism would stay away from a person like this. But establishment Democratic figures have never stopped rushing to sit next to Maher. The long list of Democrats who have made appearances on the latest season of Real Time includes Governors Josh Shapiro, Gavin Newsom, and Wes Moore; Senators Raphael Warnock, Elissa Slotkin, John Fetterman, Adam Schiff, and Chris Murphy; and 2028 presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel. Fetterman, Slotkin, and Emanuel have each condemned or rebuked Hasan Piker, while Slotkin has also stated that she would not go on his stream.
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Prominent politicians choosing to join a program hosted by someone with whom they share disagreements is not an issue on its own. The problem is the blatant double standard at play. For all of Maher’s ranting about Democrats’ going along with the Gaza genocide “lie,” most of the party establishment actually agrees with his denialism. Not one of the aforementioned Democrats who has been on Maher’s show has labeled Israel’s onslaught a genocide. (Maher did have one guest who acknowledges the genocide, Representative Ro Khanna, on his show in June.) It seems that the only red line for these and other top Democrats when it comes to engaging with a controversial media figure is whether that figure actually recognizes that Israel’s genocide is occurring—and with Democratic support.
Even without the genocide denialism—which after three years we understand taking issue with is too much to ask of establishment Democrats—Maher’s bigotry extends well into issues Democrats have claimed to care about in the past, like Islamophobia and trans rights.
And even if you concede that trans rights and opposing genocide are not the most salient issues of the day for ambitious Democrats, then at least helping rehabilitate the image of accused sex pest Kevin Spacey might force a reckoning on Maher, given how much of Democratic resistance to Trump’s second term has been focused on sexual misconduct. Apparently not, since the comedian appeared chummy with Spacey—who also admitted to flying on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane—on his podcast Club Random this past June.
Where are all the gotcha questions for Democratic politicians associating themselves with Maher? How is it that Maher’s being awarded the Kennedy Center’s prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor can be elevated as a cultural victory for the anti-Trump resistance? Maher is proving that there is less daylight between him and MAGA than meets the eye, and the silence from establishment Democrats and their media allies demonstrates that there is less daylight for them, too.
Luca GoldMansour is a Lebanese American journalist from New York City.
Fonte: The Nation » Article
