After getting his ass handed to him last week by Ice Cube over his awful n-word gaffe, Bill Maher returned to Real Time this week and attempted to get back on liberals’ good side by grilling Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow.
Or so you thought.
Instead, the HBO host chose to treat Marlow with kid gloves, much in the same manner as disgraced ex-Breitbart employee Milo Yiannopoulos, who he largely agreed with and complimented ad nauseam—only to see the absurd performance artist get exposed for promoting hebephilia days later.
ADVERTISEMENT
Maher didn’t ask Marlow why the site turned a blind eye to—or rather, wholeheartedly embraced—Yiannopoulos’ transmisogyny and racism for so long, or why Breitbart’s site traffic has cratered since Trump was elected, or why former honcho Steve Bannon branded it a “platform for the alt-right,” or why ex-employee Ben Shapiro labeled it “Pravda for Trump.” He failed to bring up writer Katie McHugh, who was recently fired for her Islamophobic and racist remarks following the London Bridge attack or whether owners the Mercers steer editorial coverage to be favorable to President Trump.
After lobbing a few softball questions about why Breitbart has thus far failed to cover the ongoing FBI probes into the Trump camp, from potential Trump-Russia collusion to the recent revelation that the President himself is under investigation for obstruction of justice, Maher brought up the recent Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, which has come under fire on the right for depicting a likeness of President Trump as Caesar. And, well, you know how the play ends.
“If Obama was Julius Caesar and he got stabbed, I think liberals would be angry about that,” Maher remarked.
“Oh, absolutely. It would be bedlam in the media. The same thing with the Kathy Griffin thing, with holding up President Trump’s head with blood on it, which was not funny. It was bizarre performance art,” Marlow replied.
“I disagree with that too,” said Maher in agreement. “I don’t think they should have Trump playing Julius Caesar and getting stabbed, and I hate Trump…So we’re agreeing that there are some places where free speech does pause.”
Only there was a staging of Julius Caesar at the popular Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 2012 depicting Obama as Caesar, and liberals didn’t bat an eye. Furthermore, the production was sponsored by Delta—who pulled out of sponsoring the recent Manhattan play following backlash on the right—and the airline company continued to sponsor the acting troupe that put on the Obama-Caesar show ex-post facto.
If that weren’t enough, Maher and Marlow came to an agreement on how bad it is that, in the words of the comedian, “corporations are getting in the act and if you do something they don’t like, they pull their funding,” with the Breitbart EIC decrying “anonymous people online” who are out there spreading “misinformation” about what the site stands for, and trying to get corporations to boycott running ads on the site. Sad!
Later on, the two came to a meeting of the minds on Muslims, with Maher citing an Amazon ad wherein an imam and a priest send each other kneepads as gifts to pray. “I think that actually happens in America, but I don’t think it happens in most of the Muslim world,” offered Maher, who has a history of Islamophobia. Marlow, whose site regularly trades in xenophobic anti-Muslim content, nodded in agreement.
“The Breitbart editors are the most wonderful, diverse, influential journalists on the planet, and no one is interested in their real story because they’re so quick to want to call people ‘racist,’” Marlow lamented.
Both he—and Maher—failed to grasp the ridiculousness of that statement, given how they quite literally just fired a high-level reporter for being, well, racist.
