Adele posted a message to her social media channels this week thanking those on the front lines fighting COVID-19. In the process, the celebrated singer unveiled a thinner frame—and the internet had a lot of thoughts about it, almost all trash.
Enter Bill Maher, noted #MeToo skeptic, with perhaps the most garbage take of them all.
On Friday night, during the interview portion of his HBO show Real Time, the comedian began by placing the bulk of the blame for the high amount of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. compared to other countries on America’s obesity problem—not, say, the fact that the Trump administration didn’t do a single thing during the month of February to contain the spread of the virus.
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“The most important thing to do, they could have said, is get yourself in better shape. You could change your health profile a lot in two months,” argued Maher. “We could be in a much better position, and it’s just like when George W. Bush said after 9/11, ‘Go shopping,’ and this was like, ‘Keep eating.’ I know people hate to hear that message, and I hate to say it, but it’s the truth: the core of this problem in this country, one reason—obviously besides the Trumpian nonsense—is that we, as a country… you look at the numbers from other countries around the world, not nearly the amount of deaths because they don’t have the same obesity profile.”
I have no idea what the hell the 9/11 comparison is about, and there’s no question that America has an obesity problem, but it’s also plagued by inept leadership, a broken health-care system, a widening wealth gap, and a big-farming epidemic that’s inserting unhealthy chemicals into our food, and many of these are contributing factors to obesity. To lay the blame for the country’s obesity problem entirely on the shoulders of its people is rubbish, and to minimize the role the Trump administration’s played in allowing the virus to spread nationwide is even more rubbish.
But Maher wasn’t finished. “When you talk about this issue, it’s very easy for other people to score cheap points by attacking the messenger, when the truth is they’re just enabling people. Basically, we’ve gotten to this place where we’re proud of gluttony,” the TV host said, before somehow tying this all to the Adele news.
“Adele lost a lot of weight—it was all over the press—and there’s a controversy about this. This is not controversial! This is purely a good thing,” offered Maher. “And by the way, the old Adele would not fare as well with COVID-19. We applaud health-care workers when they save other people’s lives; we should applaud other people, I think, when they make a move to save their own life.”
He then began reading some tweets about the Adele photo. “Did we again push another sane person in the spotlight into eating disorder?” Maher read, before weighing in: “The eating disorder is eating too much! This is insane that they think an eating disorder goes in the other direction.”
Yes, in Bill Maher’s strange world, the only eating disorder is eating too much.
