"What This Comedian Said Will Shock You" by Bill Maher
Date Finished: Feb 8, 2025
Pages: 400
How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
Published in 2024 by Simon & Schuster
Find it at Amazon
A refreshing read for our fraught political times.
My Notes:
Yale University has over 5,000 “administrators” (not professors), and Stanford in 2020 had 10,896 “managerial and professional staff” and 1,789 “administrative and technical staff.” …
There’s a children’s book called Every Body, which includes lines like “Before you were born, a group of white men started making up lots of ideas about bodies there weren’t true. They said that one kind of body was the best, and that being fat was bad and skinny was good. They were wrong, but lots of people listened to them.”
I’m sure there are people who applaud that, but to me, it showcases all that is wrong with the Left today: making everything racial, using children as frontline troops in culture wars and blithely denying patent realities: obesity is bad for your health….
MrBeast is one of the biggest stars on YouTube, staging massive stunts that are often charitable giveaways that then pay for themselves when those stunts generate millions of views. In 2023 he did one entitled “Funded Cataract Surgery for 1000 People”—and for this he was the bad guy. A reporter for the Washington Post tweeted, “What needs curing is society’s view of disabled people,” that this was “systematic ableism” and that MrBeast “seems to regard disability as something that needs to be solved.”
The Atlantic ran a piece entitled “Separating Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense,” which included lines such as “Maintaining the binary in youth sports reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting.”
The Atlantic is not fringe. Neither is the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, so please stop pretending the reality-challenged are a meaningless few.
Please. Seeing is better than not seeing. Separating sports by sex makes perfect, obvious sense. Obesity is not good. Don’t present me with a menu of delirium and then call me a “conservative” because I don’t want to jump on the Crazy Train with you.
The fact that someone could believe that the obvious physical differences between the sexes drive from socialization speaks of a fundamental problem we have today: parents raise their kids as peers, telling them they’re little geniuses, and then we all wind up pretending the predictable brain farts that would emerge from a child are actual debatable ideas. It reminds me of monarchical states where a five-year-old inherits the throne and then all the courtiers have to rationalize and carry out the whims of a toddler. Kind of like the Trump White House.
If Democrats had always policed morality as hard as they do now, they’d be down a lot of heroes: no FDR, no JFK, no RFK, no LBJ, no Clinton, no Martin Luther King Jr.. Democrats are now the party that can’t tell the difference between Anthony Weiner and Al Franken.
Trump seemed to be actually proud that he made decisions as president without learning anything. Which made him the perfect president for a nation perpetually looking at its phone.
Illiteracy wasn’t Trump’s shame, it was his bond with us; a subliterate president for a subliterate country. A country where a majority of adults are “almost constantly” online. Mostly with Andrew Tate.
… I mean this country just might be empirically, verifiably too fucking dumb to continue as an ongoing enterprise.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok—these are not places to read in the sense of garnering real and valuable information; they’re what replaced reading so you’d have more time to take pictures of your dick. Sorry, but staring at your phone doesn’t make you a reader any more than watching fireworks makes you an astronomer, or getting a tramp stamp makes your ass a museum.
If you have a bachelor’s degree, you make about 65 percent more than someone who doesn’t, and with a master’s degree, it’s more like 100 percent more. And the unemployment rate of college grads is about half what it is for high school grads.
It’s because he started a website that gave college dudes the chance to rate women whose pictures he hacked from Harvard’s databank. Yes, the most powerful man in the news business got there by inventing a “Hot or Not” site.
Because there are only so many hours in a day, and you can only get so much accomplished if you’re constantly checking to see what everybody you ever met had for lunch.
But now people get their news on Facebook by “sharing,” or as it used to be called, “hearsay.” And that’s what’s so great about social media news sources! You’re not telling lies—you’re just sharing them. And anyway, lies are the new truth.
Putin thinks it’s great—that’s why he only had to spend 150 grand on the 2016 election, because we spread his propaganda for him.
There is an entire building in St. Petersburg filled with a Russian “troll army”: hundreds of employees of their defense department sitting in front of computers, pretending to be Americans and creating thousands of tweets, memes, news sites “comments” and flat-out fake stories designed not to take sides on any issue but just to get us fighting about it. To create chaos, the better to elect a chaos candidate.
But only seeing the stuff that confirms the opinions you already have isn’t news. It’s Fox News. One reason so many Americans are apathetic about climate change is that their news sources simply ignore it as an issue.
The news media lost trust because they became eyeball-chasing clickbait whores who bump the story about climate change for the one about grizzly bears in a jacuzzi.
The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending they’re friendly nerd-gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts, selling an addictive product to children. Because let’s face it: checking your “likes” is the new smoking.
Former Facebook executive Tristan Harris says, “They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that’s how they make their money. Every time I check my phone, I’m playing the slot machine to see, ‘What did I get?’ This is one way to hijack people’s minds and create a habit, to form a habit…”
This is why average person interacts with their phone over 2,600 times a day. It wants all your attention, all the time.
A former VP at Facebook said he felt “tremendous guilt” because “the short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.”
…: fake outrage, fake brave, fake pretty, fake supportive—phones make people fake their lives instead of living their lives.
Imagine how rude that would be if, instead of a phone, you brought a magazine to the table and read it during dinner with a “friend.”
… Jonathan Swift said, “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping in after it.” In 1710.
We get it—boomers dropped the ball on the environment. We did. We dropped it like it was hot. But have you picked it up? I wish your generation were better than mine, I really do—but the sad truth is, we’re completely the same.
Powdered wigs were a long time ago. It’s time you grew up. It’s time to stop doing stupid, teenage immature things, and number one n that list is not understanding the most fundamental trade-off in life: you’re beautiful when you’re young, wise when you’re old.
The Left today is getting lots of things wrong: police departments gutted, kids taught crazy shit, unpopular thought being scrubbed, trying to reframe America as irredeemably racist—so I get the panic.
Voting for Herschel Walker was a way to say to Democrats: “All that socialism and identity politics and victimhood and oversensitivity and cancel culture and white self-loathing and forcing complicated ideas about race and sex on kids too young to understand it… literally, anything would be better than that.”
What if I told you there was a single member of Contress who brought the tobacco industry to its knees, paved the way for less expensive generic drugs, expanded Medicaid to include pregnant women and children, put the teeth into the Clean Air and Safe Drinking Water acts and wrote most of Obamacare? You probably wouldn’t know who it was—even though I just told you: Henry Waxman.
And that’s the thing an out being a workhorse instead of a show horse: no one is looking. Waxman never went on the Sunday talk shows; he didn’t do TV at all. The camera didn’t love him and the feeling was mutual. We asked him once to do Real Time and he said, “No—I’m too busy.”
Your microaggression culture doesn’t play in the Rust Belt. If a staffer hands you a speech that says “menstruating people” instead of “women,” don’t say that. Say “women.”
Lots of things make us uncomfortable; you know what makes me uncomfortable? People who start every conversation with “As a person who” or “As a survivor of.” I’m triggered every time I see a trigger warning because I’m reminded of how weak my country has become. It’s like wearing a mask on your mind.
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I’ve spent three decades on TV mocking Republicans who say climate change is “just a theory,” and now I’ve got to deal with people who say “You know what else is just a theory? Biology.”
Trump’s enduring popularity with his fans is largely because Americans are so sick of politicians who are “inauthentic”—who, essentially, are all avatar. Isn’t that what hated about Hillary?
… mature people understand humans are continually evolving, as opposed to the citizens of Wokeville, where they’re always shocked we didn’t emerge enlightened from the primordial ooze.
Semafor estimates that if the red tape could be cut on everything that’s currently stuck in the renewable queue, the United States could be 80 percent zero-carbon in six years. The enemy of clean air isn’t just Big Oil. It’s Big Permitting. It’s not that America isn’t able to get anything done anymore—it’s that we’re not allowed to.
Oranges, tomatoes, strawberries: all take around eleven gallons of water to make one pound. Almonds? Nineteen hundred gallons! There simply isn’t enough water to go around. And we have to make a painful choice: getting it in the people or getting in the nuts.
The “college” that Jerry Falwell started, Liberty University, isn’t really a college—because it teaches “creation science.” Which is the opposite of science, even though they have an actual Center for Creation Studies, complete with some bones and a guy with a lab coat. Suck on that Smithsonian Institute! And they teach that Earth is five thousand years old and dinosaur fossils washed up in Noah’s flood. This is a school you flunk out of when you get the answers right.
Conservatives often say that gay marriage “cheapens” their marriage. I think a “diploma” from Liberty University cheapens my degree from a real school.
I’d say we should take away Liberty’s accreditation, but it’s a private college and they can teach whatever they want. But at the very least, diplomas from Liberty should come with a huge asterisk next to your name, a dat the bottom it should say, “This institution teaches superstitious nonsense. Hire at your own risk.”
Your stuff has to go over there on the shelf with Zeus, Thor and the kraken. With the stuff that is not evidence based. Stuff that religious people never change their mind about, no matter what happens. That’s not atheism. I’m open to anything for which there’s evidence.
We need to stop pretending there’s no way we’ll ever understand why the Trump mob believes in him. It’s because they’re religious and they’ve already made space in their heads for shit that doesn’t make sense. When you’re a QAnon fanatic, you’re also a fundamentalist Christian—they just go together, like macaroni and cheese.
The reason Donald Trump has an easy sell with Evangelicals is because they’re hardwired to put faith over reason…
The essence of religion is: the more it doesn’t make sense, the more we like it, because it proves your faith.
Take the Seventh-day Adventists—please. This is a religion founded on the nineteenth century on Pastor William Miller’s guarantee that Jesus would return to Earth on October 22, 1844. I don’t remember everything that happened that day, but I know Jesus didn’t come back to Earth: he totally flaked and never showed up.
Did you know that 176 countries mandate vacation time by law? But one of them isn’t the Republic of “Here.” In England you get 28 paid vacation days a year. In Switzerland you get 20. In Sweden you get 25. In Greece you get infinity.
Like when Amazon destroyed the startup Diapers.com buy cutting Amazon’s own diaper prices below cost. By one estimate, this cost Jeff Bezos $200 million in his quest to corner the online diaper market—but he owns it now… Which raises the question: What is wrong with this man? OK, you had one brilliant idea—that when people get drunk at home, they’ll go online and buy shit they don’t need. Great, congratulations, you won, you’re the best at making money. But one of the rules of the game of capitalism is: you can win big, but not so big there is no game.
Conservatives govern without shame, and liberals shame without governing. It shouldn’t be that surprising that America is full of fed-up, unhappy people who just want to break shit.
Maybe the is why Warren Buffett said, “Cryptocurrencies basically have no value and they don’t produce anything… What you hope is that somebody else comes along and pays you more money for them later on, put it another way: it’s a Ponzi scheme.
We used to wake up, read the paper, see all the terrible things in the world and say, “Well, at least my life is better than those poor slobs”—but now it’s the opposite… This is how the internet gets you coming and going: guys watch the “haves” on Instagram and then go over to sites like 8chan to brood with the “have-nots.”
When liberals scream “Do something!” after a mass shooting, why aren’t we also dealing with the fact that the average American kid sees two hundred thousand acts of violence on screens before the age of eighteen, and that according to the FBI, one of the warning signs of a potential school shooter is a fascination with violence-filled entertainment.
It’s funny, Hollywood is the woks place on Earth in every other area of social responsibility… But when it comes to the unbridled romanticization of gun violence: crickkets.
Professor Sweet is right about presentism: it’s just a way to congratulate yourself about being better than George Washington because you have a gay friend, and he didn’t. But if he were alive today, he would, and if you were alive then, you wouldn’t
And having a warped view of reality leads to policies that are warped: Black-only dorms and graduation ceremonies; a growing belief in “whiteness” as a malady and white people as irredeemable; giving up on a colorblind society. Only if you believe we’ve made no progress does any of this make sense.
I say liberalism lost its way when it started thinking like that and pretended that gender apartheid in the Muslim world was just “different” instead of an abhorrent human rights violation.
But Jesus—being God—really should have known better, so when he comes back to judge the living and the dead, he’s go a lot of explaining to do. Like: “Hey, you were always performing miracles—instead of bar tricks with loaves and wine, why didn’t you zap the chains off a slave? With all the sermons and parables, why not one time throw in a little, “Oh, and this whole people-owning thing—that’s not right.” Nada. On the subject of slavery, Jesus says sweet fucketh-all.
Forty-two percent of private colleges admit applicants based almost entirely on the fact that their parents are alumni. You get in if you work hard and your dada bought a building. These are called legacy admissions, although I’ll also accept “entitled fuckface.”
Lifting up those who society has cheated or forsaken: that’s liberalism; hating all things white is just tedious virtue signaling. The answer to mass incarceration is to stop putting undeserving Black people in prison, not to put more white people in Twitter jail.
Have a little perspective about the stuff we howl about here. I’m sorry your professor said something you didn’t like—that won’t be a problem with the Taliban, because you’re not allowed to go to school. In Saudi Arabia, grown women can be jailed for doing the kinds of things we think of as routine without the permission of a male guardian. China rounds you up if you’re the wrong religion and puts you in camps. More children in Burkina Faso work than are in school.
Jim Fixx wrote The Complete Book of Running, which his heart stopped doing at fifty-two.
In other words, no matter how much you do for yourself, how right you eat, if the air is full of lead and the bug populations are out of control and your city is underwater, it doesn’t matter. You can eat kale till it comes out your ears, stay hydrated, slather on sunscreen, steam your vagina, eat your placenta, work at a standing desk and put a healing crystal up your ass, but there’s no escaping the environment we all live in.
We rewrite science now to fit ideology, or just to fit what we merely want reality to be. The fashionable term now is “body positivity,” and it is utterly Orwellian, used to describe as healthy what is precisely not healthy. “Healthy at any weight” is another in-vogue term that is an unchallenged lie. Honestly, have you ever seen a fat ninety-year-old? …. There’s a popular T-shirt that says, “I Don’t Owe No Man a Flat Stomach.” OK, no one said you did. You do you. But you’re not a freedom fighter because you want to keep eating donuts.
But I have a life tip for men. If you want to get with a woman, try this trick: Talk to her. In person.
I don’t want to live in a country without red states. I like traveling there—when people talk to you in Oklahoma, they’re not scanning the room to see if there’s a bigger celebrity.
We need to get back to what Facebook used to be: a place to see who from high school is gay, fat, bald or dead.
America is a big country filled with millions of people who don’t think the way you do and never will, and you can’t own, vanquish or disappear them. We’re stuck with them and they’re stuck with us.
For more… find it at Amazon.