On a recent episode of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher fired back at critics who have been attacking actress Cheryl Hines for not publicly denouncing her husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., over his support for Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Maher argued that Hines’s silence on the matter was not enough to satisfy the “obnoxious posers” on the far left, who he claimed were more interested in virtue-signaling on social media than in genuinely promoting progressive values.
Maher took aim at the “liberals in theory” who were calling for Hines to sacrifice her marriage in order to appease their own moral outrage. “You want to know why I’m so fed up with the left these days?” he asked. “It’s because of this kind of behavior. The liberals I grew up admiring were never like this. They didn’t go after people’s personal lives or try to bully them into conformity.”
Maher also noted that the far left’s behavior was precisely the kind of thing that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton had warned against in their recent speeches. “The politicians in the Democratic Party are generally a sane and reasonable bunch,” he said. “But the people who are making the most noise on social media, the ones who are always calling for extreme measures like defunding the police, they’re the ones who give liberalism a bad name.”
Maher’s critique of the far left was not motivated by a defense of Trump, whom he described as “awful.” Rather, he argued that the left’s behavior was undermining its own values and creating a toxic atmosphere of intolerance and bullying. “If you don’t like Trump, then don’t be like him,” Maher urged. “Don’t stoop to his level of ugliness and divisiveness.”
