Bill Maher blasted the rationale behind the NFL playing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” before the season’s first game on Sunday. He referred to the song, sometimes referred to as the “black national anthem,” as part of “segregation…under a different name” that many liberals are now pushing in a variety of arenas.

“When people say to me sometimes, ‘boy, you go after the Left a lot these days, why?’ I’m like ‘Because you’re embarrassing me!’” – @BillMaher #RealTime pic.twitter.com/u8kjGqExmr

— Brent Baker (@BrentHBaker) September 11, 2021

From NY Post:

“When people say to me sometimes, like, ‘Boy, you really go after the left these days. Why?’ Because you’re embarrassing me,” Maher said.

“That’s why I’m going after the left in a way you never did before. Because you’re inverting things that I’m not going to give up on being liberal.

“This is what these teachers are talking about. You’re taking children and making them hyper-aware of race in a way they wouldn’t otherwise be.”[….]

“Now, maybe we should get rid of our national anthem, but I think we should have one national anthem,” Maher told his viewers during Friday’s show.

“I think when you go down a road where you’re having two different national anthems, colleges sometimes now have… many of them have different graduation ceremonies for black and white, separate dorms — this is what I mean.

“Segregation. You’ve inverted the idea. We’re going back to that under a different name.”

Now, I have no issue with playing “Life Every Voice and Sing” — if folks want to hear it in addition to the national anthem — and if the reason to play it was a cultural celebration. It’s a song with a long cultural history. The issue I have with it being played in this context is how the left is manipulating it with the false argument that somehow the national anthem is leaving out black people, which is false.

So it’s a way, as Maher says, of preaching segregation and division, to suggest that the national anthem is somehow divisive when it applies to all Americans. To suggest it doesn’t apply is itself racist, as though you’re arguing that everyone doesn’t have a right to that same song as their own, when it belongs to all Americans.

Maher is, in many ways, an old classical liberal — what the word used to mean — not what it has come to mean with the radical leftists of today. He’s taken issue with the left many times in the past. He’s right about the push at every level to divide by race. He pointed out how schools have become a “social justice factory” with things like Critical Race Theory being taught. He’s rightly seeing how illiberal all this is — and how the “anti-racists” are the most pro-racism.

It’s important to understand that the leftist “woke” effort isn’t really about anti-racism, or it wouldn’t push racism. It’s not about unity, or it wouldn’t push division. How do you bring people together if you are always pushing people apart? That’s the false dichotomy of these leftist efforts. But it has a hold of a lot of our institutions, from the schools to the military, with the aim of “fundamental transformation.” Because the final aim isn’t bringing people together, but bring people to the far left.