Bill Maher Blasts the NFL’s Black National Anthem

CLAY: We were talking about this earlier. I took my son. He wanted to go for his birthday to the Titans game. I understand there are people out there that say, “Why would you support any form of sports, including the NFL, when they allow protests, when they are being disrespectful?” I thought, by and large, the NFL on September 12th was very respectful of September 11th.

There was not the black national anthem played at the game that I went to. But it was played on the opening Thursday night, and Bill Maher talked about this. Bill Maher increasingly is willing to attack the absurdity of left-wing ideals, and he’s doing so in an intelligent fashion. We want to play this for you.

MAHER: When people say to me sometimes, “Like, boy, you go after the left a lot these days. Why?” I’m like, “Because you’re embarrassing me!”

AUDIENCE: (laughter) (smattering of applause)

MAHER: That’s why I’m going after the left in a way I never did before, because you’re inverting things that I… I’m not going to give up on being liberal. This is what these teachers are talking about, that you’re taking children and making them hyperaware of race in a way they wouldn’t otherwise be.

I mean, I saw last night on the football game, Alicia Keyes sang Lift Every Voice and Sing which now I hear is called “the black national anthem.” Maybe we should get rid of our national anthem, but I think we should have one national anthem. 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.

CLAY: He’s 100% right. We used to have fun with this because I think the only way you can win on issues like these is by ridiculing the absurdity. We would have, Buck, on our show we would play the Hispanic, the white, the black, and the Asian national anthem. We also had the gay national anthem and the women’s national anthem to draw into it. Yeah. It was fun. We had callers call in.

BUCK: Are those real? Those exist?

CLAY: We picked them.

BUCK: Okay. (laughing)

CLAY: We did it in a comedic skit.

BUCK: I didn’t mean I didn’t know there was a, quote, “black national anthem” until pretty recently, so I had to have the possibility that there were these others.

CLAY: We did it in a comedic fashion. For instance, white people drafted Sweet Caroline as the white national anthem.

BUCK: You could have — I don’t know — Living on a Prayer, maybe?

CLAY: Oh, that’s a good one too. I need to get that audio sent to us so that we can ridicule this. But it points to his larger issue, which is the entire point of the national anthem is that it brings us all together. Once you start excluding people based on race — or doing different treatment based on race — that’s called racism, which is really what the left is doing now.

BUCK: It’s not defensible, really. Intellectually, the things that are happening now that the left is pushing, it always devolves into incoherence which is why they respond to it with so much anger and accusations.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: They don’t try to convince you about why this is a good thing. They say, “It is. Shut up. You’re racist.”