CLAY: Bill Maher traditionally was considered to be of the left. He now, on his politically incorrect show on HBO, has recognized what both you and I have talked about for some time, which is most insanity in America today is not emanating from the right at all. It’s coming from the left. They’ve lost their minds. Bill Maher, I really do think he’s been red pilled in some ways. You know hum better than I do, Buck.

And certainly when I say “red pill,” I don’t mean that you take a red pill and suddenly you are complete Republican Party dogma. I just mean on the big issues: Freedom, on sanity, on returning to normal life with covid, all of those things. (chuckling) Bill Maher has taken the red pill on those aspects, and listen here as he talks on his show on HBO about the way that left wingers are now responding to him for what he is saying about the insanity in our country.

MAHER: Let’s get this straight: It’s not me who’s changed. It’s the left who is now made up of a small contingent who’ve gone mental, and a large contingent who refuse to call them out for it. But I will! That’s why I’m a hero at Fox these days.

CROWD: (applause)

MAHER: Which shows just how much liberal have their head up their (bleep) because if they really thought about it, they would have made me a hero on their media.

CROWD: (applause)

MAHER: But that can’t happen in this ridiculous new era of mind-numbing partisanship where finger it real about the nonsense in the Democratic Party it makes me an instant hero to Republicans. People sometimes say to me, “Y’know, you didn’t… You didn’t used to make fun of the left as much.” Yeah, because they didn’t give me so much to work with.

BUCK: He’s right, by the way, in the sense that the left has gotten even crazier. I think there’s a lot to make fun of them, too, but we have now reached a stage where I think because of their cultural dominance but also the tech platform dominance, you’ve seen a lot… Technology has shown us much more of what the left-wing mind-set in this country really is. They’re not able to get away with the same pretense they used to. For example, journalists. Why is it that no person who pays attention now and has any judgment or honesty whatsoever sits around saying, “Well, you know, the New York Times and CNN and,” you know, the high —

It’s not me who’s changed.

CLAY: They really call it straight. Yes.

BUCK: — the high churches, yeah, “They’re just really calling it down the middle,” Clay. No one thinks that. It’s for a lot of reasons but one of the big ones is that all of the journos who work for those places during the Trump administration in particular were at 10 a.m. tweeting, “OMG, literal fascism coming for all of us! I’m shaking RN,” for right now. And then at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, they’re sitting at a press conference; they’re saying, “I’m just a journalist. I don’t have the opinions.”

And I’m like, “Oh, okay. So you’re a bunch of frauds.” With Big Tech, they’ve been able to push their advantage in the information-dissemination space such that we now see it’s just all warring propaganda machines, and they’re pushing their advantage. They are openly demanding that points of view — that end up being correct, by the way, in many instances, in many cases, talking about covid or the Hunter Biden laptop story — have to be shut down from public discourse. They are showing us that they are the authoritarians that we thought they were all along. Dare I say, they are the commies that I have been worried about.

CLAY: Well, and what I would say about social media in general over time, Buck, is it reveals who you are, which is what you’re saying about journalists. When we weren’t seeing their tweets every minute of every day all day long and they were just a byline in a newspaper, you didn’t really know much about the bylined person in the newspaper, right? As soon as you started seeing the way that they shared stories, the way that they behaved, the mask fell off, right, of claiming impartiality.

I think what also happened was — and this deserves probably a full book-length examination. This is good life advice in general: Be careful what you hate lest you become it in some way. And what I mean by that all of those Democrats, Buck, who were screaming that Donald Trump was a dictator-in-waiting, that he was an authoritarian… I think this is so, so important.

When Donald Trump had the greatest opportunity to take dictatorial powers maybe in any of our lives when covid arrived in March of 2020 in an election year, do you know what he did, Buck? He let every mayor and every governor make decisions about how to respond to covid in their particular jurisdictions, and then Joe Biden did the exact opposite when he came into his office. He immediately exerted federal power in a dictatorial bent.

And what interestingly happened was, Buck, the same journalists who have been talking about Donald Trump dictator cheered on the dictatorial impulses of Joe Biden as it pertained to covid. Trump was actually, in that moment — in that crucible instant when everyone was panicked. He was a federalist. He deferred to other forms of government to a degree in a Joe Biden would have never dreamed of.

BUCK: I think you can argue he deferred a little too much. (laughing)

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I think if anything.

CLAY: That is the criticism, but it’s the exact opposite criticism that we heard about Trump for four years.

BUCK: He was a little too laissez-faire about a lot of things including, you know, going along too long with Fauci and all the rest. I spoke to the president about this in the Oval back in May of 2020 and the one thing I remember — and I shook my hand on the way out. He wasn’t wearing a mask. I wasn’t wearing a mask.

CLAY: Of course not.

BUCK: We all knew at that point already. This was before vaccines, we were like, “Give me a break.” But I said, “Sir, no more lockdowns, no more of this madness, right?” He said, “Yeah.” So we would have been… He promised me on the way out of the Oval Office. We would have been such a different place if he had won that 2020 election. We would already be where we need to be which is covid’s here forever, we need to deal with it and move on with our lives and stop being crazy. Instead, we’re still in this fight and it’s pushed on by the insane left.