It’s no secret that Bill Maher has something of a soft spot for blond conservative women who traffic in incendiary opinions, viewing them as fellow culture warriors in an ongoing (and inflated) crusade against “political correctness.”
For years, the comic has been good friends with Ann Coulter, who’s served as a frequent guest on his various programs, where she’s been treated with kid gloves (despite her oft-racist opinions). And now, he’s repeatedly offered up his popular HBO platform to Megyn Kelly, who was terminated from NBC after defending white people dressing up in blackface on Halloween.
During her last Real Time appearance in January of 2020, Maher proclaimed that Kelly was not “really a racist” and blamed “cancel culture” for her firing. His full-throated defense of Kelly failed to mention her long history of dabbling in racism, including her former Fox News show referring to Michelle Obama as “Obama’s Baby Mama”; her odd obsession with the “New Black Panthers” being a tremendous threat to society; her repeated disgust at depictions of a Black Santa Claus; calling a Black teenage girl who was assaulted at a Texas pool party by a police officer “no saint”; and saying that Black communities in America have a “thug mentality.” These are just a few examples of her “mentality” toward Black folks in America.
Well, Maher invited Kelly back onto Real Time on Friday night to discuss—you guessed it!—culture war stuff, which they perceive to be the most pressing issue in the country amid a global pandemic that’s killed upwards of 500,000 Americans and left millions more in poverty (and has disproportionately affected Black and Hispanic communities).
Maher began by gawking at Kelly’s black dress, referring to it as her old “Fox News” attire, and said she was the “pretty, blonde, and normal” one at the network surrounded by “monsters.” He then asked her if she could work for the current iteration of Fox News, which has leaned further to the right in the Trump era.
“There are personalities there who went hard-right during the Trump administration, right? Maria Bartiromo sounded very different than when I was there. Lou Dobbs sounded kind of the same as he always did,” Kelly replied.
Then, they got down to the real reason Maher invited Kelly onto the program: her recent decision to pull her kids from New York City private school, citing how the “leftist” school was teaching her children critical race theory at too young an age. Kelly has been shouting from the rooftops about this school situation in an apparent effort to draw attention to her new podcast.
“You took your kids out of the school in New York, and I’ve been hearing—anecdotally—very much the same thing from many parents,” said Maher, who surely hangs out with a bunch of New York parents. “Just tell us why, basically, you did this.”
“We were in the New York City private school system,” explained Kelly, “and they were definitely leftist, we’re more center-right, and that’s fine… then they started taking a really hard turn toward social justice stuff.”
Kelly described how the school entered her third grade son into what she called “an experimental trans education program on these 8- and 9-year-old boys. And it wasn’t about support. We felt it was about trying to convince them, like, ‘Come on over!’”
The podcast host said they—along with many other parents—objected, and the school subsequently apologized. She also complained about a letter that her school apparently circulated that described, among other things, “Black bodies dropping around us” in the streets and that white supremacy was largely to blame, which Kelly felt was “divisive” and “racist.”
“It’s so divisive and counterproductive. And it wasn’t just our school in New York… and it’s all over New York,” argued Kelly, citing no additional examples.
Kelly then drew a line between her own issues with her children’s school and a recent incident where a 17-year-old Black girl in St. Louis falsely accused a fellow white high school student of saying something to the effect of “all Black lives don’t matter,” and held this up as evidence that white people are being targeted by Black people due to the color of their skin, which she described as “racism.”
“Don’t gaslight me,” said Maher. “I feel like this is beyond race. I feel like it’s a generational thing where so many people want their identity wrapped up in being a victim.”
“That’s the push now, is to lean into victimhood,” added Kelly. “And it’s not just a race thing. I mean, I see it with some of my fellow women. It’s not that the #MeToo situation wasn’t real, but we don’t have to lean into victimhood—even when we might be victims.”
To have two rich white people suggest to a predominately white audience that the real problem in America right now is white people being targeted at a time when Black Americans are being hospitalized from COVID-19 at 2.9x the rate of white Americans and are 1.5x more likely to die from the disease, and when Black Americans are being laid off more, hired less, and offered less in the way of unemployment benefits compared to white Americans during the pandemic, is out of touch to say the least.
