Bill Maher is going through an evolution of sorts, or perhaps a realization.
He's starting to understand he has a lot more in common with Ronald Reagan than he previously thought. Telling Maher that a decade ago might have caused him to vomit, but now, he sits in his chair opposite of a guy who was forced out of his band because he badmouthed Antifa, smoking a cigar and wondering where the hell his party went.
On his podcast, Club Random, Maher had a conversation with former Mumford and Sons banjo player, Winston Marshall. Marshall left the band he helped found in 2021 after he praised Andy Ngo and his book on Antifa. The left responded by going after Marshall, threatening to "cancel" the band, and in this case, possibly cause harm to bandmates and crew.
It's a poignant reminder of just how far the left has fallen. Marshall represents the end-result of radicalism. A man can't say violent and dangerous people are violent dangerous without the left getting angry about it, and making the threat of violence and danger real.
But this is the left now. This is the infection it carries, and one that goes so deep that it's even seized large parts of the Democrat Party.
Maher is looking at the party and seeing a future of irrelevance. If it doesn't change, it will fall into irrelevance thanks to its "true believers" unwilling to wake up, see how far left they've gone, and make a course correction back toward the center.
“A lot of people would say right now the Democratic Party is still in that mode, which is going to render them, possibly, an irrelevant party if they don't change,” Maher told Marshall.
I've been saying the exact same thing on this very website. The left will radicalize itself until its bubble has effectively shrunk so far that it becomes a tertiary party, much akin to the Libertarian Party. Maher has even reached the same obvious conclusion that I have. If the Democrat Party wants to be relevant again, it has to start moving to the center.
“Much more centrism—get rid of the woke baggage, you know? Old school liberal is what I usually describe myself as,” said Maher.
(READ: If the Democrats Ever Want to Win Again, They're Going to Have to Stop Being the Left)
NEW: Bill Maher says Democrats didn’t just flirt with woke—they married it, and now it’s dragging the whole party off a cliff.
— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) April 13, 2025
Maher just dropped a brutal reality check: if Democrats don’t cut ties with the woke cult, they’re finished.
“You get a certain amount of cult… pic.twitter.com/2U2gFTOmVV
I actually don't disagree with Maher. I truly hope the left begins divorcing itself from its radical infection and brings itself back toward the center. Having to fight off a radical enemy that has infected a major establishment within the government is far more destructive and obstructive than we might think. Moreover, the possibility of them getting back into power and truly harming the country and its people is always overhead.
Yes, they will eventually make themselves irrelevant, but that timeline isn't exactly set in stone. Politics isn't a static thing. The law of undulation is absolute, but why and how far the pendulum swings is a three-body-problem.
Still, if the left is going to truly divorce itself from its own radicalism, these would-be centrists have to recognize the radicalism in themselves. For this, we can also use Maher as an example.
It has to be understood that the left didn't become radical out of nowhere. It was escorted there by people like Maher, who invested themselves in "social justice" and partook in the left's habit of jumping on opponents with accusations and suggestions of being radicals themselves. For years, I watched as every Republican under the sun was labeled a "Nazi," accused of trying to literally kill people, put people back in chains, strip rights from women, and on and on. If you're on that team, that kind of talk is going to have an effect on people's perception of reality, especially if that perception is being crafted by a legacy media with major platforms.
It's an issue Maher still has, and even demonstrated in the very conversation he had with Marshall.
At one point, the conversation fell on Musk's "Nazi salute" that wasn't a Nazi salute. Maher conceded that you're going to get Nazis on a free-speech platform, but Musk retweeting them in an effort to lean into the outrage to make a joke out of it was too far.
Marshall asked a simple question: "Was he retweeting Nazis?"
Maher immediately backtracked, as if his old habits were dying a little too hard.
Winston Marshall calls out Bill Maher's bluff after he says Elon Musk is retweeting "naz*s."pic.twitter.com/yo7PwfAxhF
— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) April 14, 2025
If "old school liberals" want the Democrat Party back, they're going to have to stop feeding the monster threatening to eat them now, too. They have to stop looking at Republicans as evil people, and going so far as to take things into extreme territory when disagreeing.
They have to train themselves to not be radicals if they want radicalism to dissipate in the party. It has to unlearn what it's taught itself for decades.
It's not going to be an easy task, but if a nation-wide awakening is happening, then maybe it can.
