These days, I usually do my best to avoid Bill Maher. Alas, this weekend I happened to catch a clip of his show from Friday going around social media, and because I am a pathologically curious person with a slight masochistic streak, I had to see what people were talking about.
Now, I hope you’re sitting down for this, because Maher spent a total of eight minutes talking about how the Left is now so incredibly extreme that it is pushing people to the right. The thing he is het up about right now are “zombie lies” people tell about Canada that he says are no longer true.
The main ways we are being horribly extreme this time are “wokeness” (just in general), pushing for rights for trans people, immigrants, and, now, universal healthcare, which he claimed has been a disaster in Canada.
Why has it been a disaster? Well, one of the reasons he cites is that Canadians now spend 13 percent of their GDP on healthcare. That’s a pretty big number! You know what’s a bigger number? 17.3 percent. You know who spends 17.3 percent? That would be the United States. (Down from 19.7 in 2020!) This would have probably been a good thing for his writers to have looked up before they let him get smug about it. It would also probably have been a good idea to look at what countries spend per capita on health care.
As you can see in this graph, Canada spends an average $6,319 per person, while the US spends $12,555.
But I guess those lies don’t count, because they’re not zombie lies, as those who repeat them have no brains left to eat.
Maher also complained about the current state of healthcare in Canada, noting that they are more likely to have longer wait times than … other countries that also have universal healthcare. And you know who also has longer wait times than other countries with universal healthcare? Well, again, that would be the US. We’re currently doing a little better than Canada is — 33 percent “sometimes, rarely, or never get an answer from their regular doctor on the same day” (yes, it’s weird wording) versus 28 percent here.
Now, first of all, if Maher’s writers had actually been paying enough attention to Canada to, you know, know what they are talking about, they would have been aware that the reason for this is that provinces are in charge of healthcare and that most of the provinces have conservative governments that that are basically trying to break the government.
Second, I would just like to note that if the thing standing in your way of supporting universal healthcare is “wait times,” why would the solution to that be “no healthcare or less healthcare for some people,” instead of “we need more doctors and nurse practitioners?”
The gist, of this, of course, was that pajama-pants-wearing-liberals think Canada is super great. Also that some people really can tell the same joke for over a decade.
But here’s the thing. He’s doing this to warn us. He’s trying to help!
“Honestly Canada, I’m not saying any of this because I enjoy it, I don’t because I’ve always enjoyed you,” he said, ever so plaintively. “But I need to cite you as a cautionary tale to help my country. And the moral of that tale is, ‘Yes, you can move too far left.’ And when you do, you wind up pushing the people in the middle to the right.”
“At its worst, Canada is what Americans think happens when there’s no one putting a check on extreme wokeness.”
Someone should probably tell Bill Maher that Canada started transitioning to single payer back in 1968. Therefore, it’s real unlikely that these recent issues (that are still not as bad as our issues, sorry) he cites have as much to do with single payer as much as who is in charge of it.
Naturally, because it’s Bill Maher, the subject turned to trans people. Remember that Canadian shop teacher who was very obviously trying to troll the idea of trans rights by insisting he be allowed to wear enormous Z cup prosthetic breasts to school? Yeah, Bill Maher is still upset about that. That just goes too far!
“They say in politics,” he said “liberals are the gas pedal, and conservatives are the brakes, and I’m generally with the gas pedal, but not if we’re driving off a cliff.”
I would like to point out here that there is actually a condition called breast hypertrophy in which a cis woman’s natural breasts can be that big or even bigger. It can happen during puberty, it can happen when someone is pregnant, it can even happen as a side effect of certain drugs. If that were to happen to someone, it would be pretty fucked up to fire them over it. And illegal.
Maher then pointed to how even in many countries in Europe, the land we all idolize and use to tell conservatives they are being backwards, they have started restricting certain hormones in treatment for youths seeking gender-affirming care, and then pretended we’re doing no such thing here. Alas, his writers seem to have missed the part where several states have straight up banned gender-affirming care for adolescents entirely.
Oh! Also, per Maher, all of the European countries swung too far to the left, allowed too many immigrants in and so now they are all electing fascists. This, too, is a lesson for us, because if we go too far, things are going to turn into a giant garbage fire and we won’t like who they pick to fix it. (Picture of Trump.)
Okay. Let’s play this game for a minute, shall we? The premise is that the Left is going too far, and it’s going to force very reasonable people like Bill Maher to the right. We know it’s true because there are always five people in comments sections saying they were on the left but were pushed to the right by the Left being “too extreme!”
Our extreme: treat trans people with dignity and respect, help refugees from other nations, universal healthcare, general “wokeness,” which Maher finds personally annoying.
Their extreme: Literal Nazis, Proud Boys, Christian Nationalists, Groypers, tradwives, people who think Bill Gates put the Mark of the Beast in a microchip and then put it in the vaccine, January 6-ers, election deniers, the MyPillow guy, people who try to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, Pizzagate, QAnon, Supreme Court justices who overturn Roe v. Wade, the presidents who appoint them, self-professed time travelers, Marjorie Taylor Greene, people who fully believe that Bill Maher wears red shoes made out of baby leather …
I mean, I could go on.
Ever hear anyone say “Oh no! You’re going to push people to the left if you keep yammering on about mole children or taking away social programs they rely on to get by?” No, you do not.
I am going to tell you a secret here. That secret is that there has yet to be a point in the last 100 or so years in which the Left was not supposedly “going too far.” There has been no time when conservatives were like, “Oh yes, these people are basically fine, upstanding citizens who are moving society along at a pace with which we are basically comfortable!” There has been no time at which “reasonable centrists” were not crying out in the night, “Stop it! Please! You’re going to frighten the townsfolk! They’re just not ready!”
And who was going to do that? Well, starting from the 1900s, we’ve got suffragettes, anarchists, socialists, communists, slutty Hollywood people, JAZZ!, flappers, back to the anarchists and communists again, then beatniks and Hollywood communists and JAZZ! and possible communist Hollywood people, civil rights activists, hippies, Vietnam War protesters, that literally one protest where some feminists burned a bra, then Jimmy Carter’s lack of machismo, then communists again, then ACT UP and other gay rights groups, anti-apartheid activists, then Black people tired of police brutality, political correctness, anarchists again, Iraq War protesters, any Democratic politician being seen without a tiny flag pin, Barack Obama just generally being a Black guy, Obamacare, same-sex marriage, Occupy Wall Street, social justice warriors, feminists arguing on Twitter, Black Lives Matter, college students protesting things, anarchists but now they’re Antifa, socialists but now they’re open about it, women with pussy hats, trans people, immigrants, “wokeness” … and that just about brings us up to today.
We’ve been doing this dance for a pretty long time, mostly over the same damn things. Quite frankly, if we don’t have a few Bill Mahers out there crying that the Left left them, we’re probably doing something wrong.
But let’s be clear. Anyone who says they were on the Left and what pushed them over the edge is either annoying people on social media (because lord knows conservatives are never annoying on social media), or being expected to treat any group of people decently, is either a liar, someone with no actual principles, or both.
Probably both.
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