Bill Maher is warning Democrats that the far-left wing of the party may cost them his vote.
The comedian and HBO “Real Time” host ripped what he described as a socialist creep inside the Democratic Party, saying the new faces being celebrated by the party keep turning out to sound less like liberals and more like revolutionaries.
“Not a week goes by where I don’t read about some newly chosen excited new face in the Democratic party and then when that face opens its mouth the Communist Manifesto or some other crazy s- – – comes out,” Maher said last week.
Maher did not frame the issue as a distant faction fight. He said voters need to recognize what is happening now.
“People gotta realize this is going on,” he said. Then he made the warning personal.
“Yes, my vote is in play. I’m not voting for anyone who thinks the wrong side won the Cold War or cheers for the intifada like it’s the World Cup.”
His clearest punchline came when he turned the left’s own language back on Democrats.
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After joking about people who obsess over colonization, Maher said the takeover is happening inside their own political home.
“You know what’s being colonized now? The Democratic Party.”
Maher pointed to a pledge from Reps. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., and Adam Gray, D-Calif., as proof that even a simple statement of moderation now draws a weak response from Democrats in Congress.
The pledge asked Democratic lawmakers to back three basic lines about capitalism, public safety and the country itself.
“We are capitalists, not socialists. We want safety, not lawlessness. We are proud, not ashamed of America,” the pledge said, according to Maher.
Maher told the audience that language should not be difficult for congressional Democrats.
“These should not be hard words for a congressional Democrat to sign onto,” he said. Only eight out of 212 did.
Maher said he was not claiming most elected Democrats already belong to the Democratic Socialists of America wing of the party.
His point was that the leftward pressure is growing while party leaders refuse to stamp it out.
“And, no, this nonsense is not where most Democratic politicians are right now,” Maher said. “But it’s also becoming a raging fire festival in the party that neither is anyone putting out.”
The kinds of candidates now reaching office, he argued, are no longer just flirting with left-wing slogans.
“People are actually getting elected now who literally don’t think we should have police or prisons or borders,” Maher said.
The “vote is in play” line was not a one-night flourish.
Maher had made a similar threat last month while speaking with ABC News “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl, tying his discomfort to the party’s ideological direction while still making clear that Donald Trump remained a red line.
“My vote is in play because it can’t be Trump running, so I’m not living in communist America,” Maher said then.
He also rejected the usual defense that the Democratic Socialists of America should be treated as socialist, not communist.
“I mean, I know the talking point is that it’s not communism, it’s socialism. OK, I’ve read the quotes from the DSA platform from their own mouths. Don’t tell me I’m not seeing what I am seeing,” Maher said.
Maher’s Friday night complaints about the left did not stop at party politics.
He also went after Dr. Anthony Fauci, days after the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times during a Senate hearing over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Maher’s problem with Fauci centered on the origins of the virus that caused more than seven million confirmed deaths worldwide.
“He was caught in actual lies,” Maher said.
For Maher, the wet market narrative and the dismissal of the lab-leak theory remain central.
“The big issue to me is the origin of this, which is very important. How did it start?” he said.
Maher accused Fauci of steering the public toward the idea that the virus came from animal-to-human contact at a wet market in Wuhan, China, while treating a possible lab escape as forbidden talk.
“He was telling people up front when it first began [that] it was from the wet markets,” Maher said.
At the time, Maher argued, anyone who suggested the virus escaped from a lab was dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.
“And he knew better,” Maher continued. “Because we have him in his diary telling us what he was saying to other scientists, who were saying, ‘No, absolutely.’”
The Senate hearing also focused on National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funding of “gain-of-function” research in China, an issue Maher said should have been debated openly.
He said he would have opposed that research but still considered the argument legitimate.
“I would always have said, don’t do it, but it’s a viable debate,” Maher said.
He described the question as whether researchers should make a dangerous bacteria more dangerous in order to study it.
“Maybe if it got out it would be even worse. I think that’s what did happen,” he said.
Maher said the lab-leak fight became another example of a scientific debate getting swallowed by racial politics.
“We could have had that debate in a rational way,” Maher said.
Instead, he argued, the country made the question about prejudice.
“We didn’t want to do that. Because why? Because we make everything about race. And this is one of the repercussions in this.”
Maher said people were branded racist for raising the possibility that the virus escaped from a lab.
“You couldn’t say it escaped from the lab, because that was the racist point of view somehow — that the entire Asian continent would have been somehow complicit in this because it escaped from the [lab],” Maher said. “It was ridiculous.”
He ended by saying anti-prejudice norms had morphed into something else.
“But that is where they went,” Maher said. “You were racist if you said this escaped from a lab. I think we’ve morphed from a place where we want to obviously not be prejudiced against anybody, to where people of color can never do any wrong.”