Bill Maher claims he sides with conservatives, but I think he is pandering

Bill Maher isn't as bad as almost all of the other late night talk show hosts in his liberalism but lately he has been appearing on my newsfeeds as parroting conservative talking points almost to the point where he seems to be a conservative of sorts. Like most people who somewhat pay attention to what is going on with political pundits, I bought into it as well because I think that the people who write the news that I read were just so amazed and happy that they had a new "convert" from the left on their side.

I don't think that is what is really going on here and I think he kind of revealed his true colors when he was a recent podcast with Joe Rogan.

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I suspect that a lot of people who are in the entertainment or news industry don't really have any morals or standpoints on things but they simply choose who their target audience is going to be and then run with that. In the past 6 years or so we have seen a majority of the media go extremely far left and while I would like to believe that Maher actually is one of the sensible ones, I think that there is probably a better chance that he saw an opportunity to set himself apart from the pack by pretending to be a centrist or even conservative in some situations.

I don't believe that his sentiment is genuine; especially since he was one of the ones leading the pack to play the usual "our entire show is about bashing Donald Trump" card just like everyone else. I think that he and his team looked at the diminishing numbers that a lot of these shows were seeing because of this stance and decided to dial it back a bit and see if they could manage to hang onto a larger audience and while I have not dug into the numbers, I think it has worked for him. He at least appeared to be someone who sat on the fence and had an open mind about all things in politics. I felt that way until I listened to him on the Joe Rogan Experience over the past couple of days.

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I think that most reasonably intelligent people can see why it is that Rogan is the new "king of all media." It is because Joe doesn't try to convince people of anything nor does he claim to have the high ground on any issue. For the most part, Joe doesn't even claim to know more than his guests do and has them on in order to ask questions so that he, and his audience, can attempt to learn more about it. This is true whether or not the conversation is about politics, covid, or MMA. Joe sits back and lets the guests talk rather than try to run the conversation or trick the guests into a sound byte that is so common whenever a guest is on other talk shows.

Conservatives are very hesitant to appear on liberal shows and liberals are very hesitant to appear on conservative shows with good reason: They realize that it is a trap and the hosts are going to do everything in their power to try to make them look stupid. Joe never does this regardless of whether or not he agrees with his guests and this is the reason why Joe is able to get people on his show from all across the spectrum. This is not something that Fox, MSNBC, CNN, or others would be able to do because the people in question would turn down the invitation. What we end up with on all those other shows is just a bunch of people agreeing with one another and therefore, nobody ever learns anything.

Now on to why I think Maher is a fraud as was revealed in his recent podcast with Joe Rogan.

At the very start of the show Bill kept talking about how he and Joe are a rarity in that they are some of the few people out there that can talk about certain points without losing their cool and are willing to listen to an opposing view calmly and have a discussion about it.

It was only about 10 minutes later before Maher broke exactly that rule. Maher brought up climate change and how Republicans don't believe in it - which might be true for a lot of them but it is unfair to lump everyone into one category. Joe then told Bill Maher than he has recently had guests on his show who have very different views on climate change in the past month or so and then started to talk about a world-renowned physicist who is considered an expert on the subject that was on his show and demonstrated with thousands of years of evidence that the fluctuations in climate are a natural phenomenon that we have evidence has occurred many times before.

Bill immediately went on the defensive and refused to listen to any of what Joe had to say. He started interrupting Joe whenever Rogan was talking even though Joe was simply reading part of what the guy had said. Joe was not interjecting his own opinion on the subject but was simply reading what this guy had said and was recommending that both Maher and the listeners to at least check out what this scientist, who has dedicated his life to the subject, has to say. Maher was completely uninterested in even listening to the information because unlike what he had said just minutes ago he has already made his mind up about this topic and is unwilling to hear any information to the contrary.

This happened again a bit later in the show when they briefly talked about Covid and Maher even brought up Ivermectin and how it is completely ineffective in preventing the virus. As you might be aware this is something that landed Rogan in the news for quite some time because one of the many drugs that he took when he got Covid was Ivermectin.

Joe, unlike Maher, did not become defensive and listened to Maher as he babbled on about how everyone needs to get vaccinated and listen to the CDC's advice. Bill also dismissed Rogan's concerns about how the pharmaceutical industry has been raking in record profits from vaccine production.

I think that Joe realized that even touching base on these topics was only going to make the show ugly and he moved on to other things but for me and any other conservatives that were listening I think the true colors of Maher were shown on that show: He isn't really a centrist, he just pretends to be so that his show can get better ratings. It is worth noting that Maher's ratings and audience is a mere drop compared to Rogan's waterfall of listeners.

I guess you could say that I applaud Maher for coming on the show because he is one of the more famous liberals out there and yes, sometimes talks about things that make sense when he criticizes the left and how crazy they have become. After listening to the podcast, I came to the conclusion that I think Maher is a fraud and only does these things for his own personal gain, not because he actually believes it.

The episode in question is episode 1804 and you can listen to it for free on Spotify if you want to hear what it is that I am talking about. I think that you will quickly realize that Maher is not who he claims to be if you just listen to a half hour of it.