Bill Maher’s Audience Hated Me, Now He’s My Fellow COVID Truther
Facts from the Hollywood liberal on 'pandemic panic' got no applause
When you’re on stage for Bill Maher’s show, you can’t see the studio audience. The TV lights are so bright on the set that the audience is a big black hole. But you can hear them clearly. The applause rings out so loudly in the huge HBO studio that you have to wait for them to be quiet to hear what those sitting next to you say.
When I was on “Real Time”, the producers warned me in advance that the audience would boo me. They wanted me to be prepared to hold my ground in the debate (3 against 1) on Donald Trump, conservative principles and gun control. I was nervous, but I steeled myself backstage. There were millions of people watching the live show, and I was not going to let the audience spook me.
When the show went live, I performed as instructed. I ignored the loud boos or the quiet non-response after everything I said. I deliberately looked out into the black hole — where I knew the audience was sitting — and smiled to show that I wasn’t going to back down just because everyone in Hollywood thought I was either stupid or dangerously wrong.
So it must have been a unique experience for Maher on Friday night when he did his monologue about COVID and the usually boisterous audience was mostly silent with only an occasional half-hearted laugh or clap. (Watch in the video below.)
Maher essentially scolded his audience for being deliberately ignorant and passive during the pandemic. He fearlessly went after the powers that control his own base of support- the liberal media and the government - for lying to the public.
Over the past year, the COVID pandemic has prompted the medical establishment, the media and the government to take a scared-straight approach to getting the public to comply with their recommendations. Well, I’m from a different school. Give it to me straight doc because in the long run that always works better than you can’t handle the truth.
I’ve been calling this concept -- fear mongering to force the public to comply to mandates - the “Pandemic Panic.” It has worked so far because, I theorize, the American public suffers from the psychiatric problem called “learned helplessness” that resulted from the original national lockdown last spring.
Maher’s big point was the direct link between serious COVID cases and obesity. It is the one known direct medical correlation. And it’s also the one thing that none of the liberal institutions that run the country now-- media, government, medical establishment - will risk their power by pushing because it alienates most of the public.
I think a lot of people died because talking about obesity had become a third rail in America.
I know you’ve heard me pound this fried drumstick before, but since I last mentioned it, a stunning statistic was reported — 78% of those hospitalized, ventilated, or dead from COVID have been overweight.
It is the key piece of the puzzle by far the most pertinent factor, but you dare not speak its name.
I learned about the obesity “third rail” when I tweeted on March 22 in response to Krispy Kreme offering free doughnuts to anyone who got the COVID vaccine.
The backlash online has been intense.
I may be a Karen, but it’s not one doughnut. It’s approximately 270 doughnuts. This is the terms of the Krispy Kreme “Vaccine offer”:
I tried debating with facts from their beloved CDC:
Undead Meathead @Undead_Meathead
@emilymiller @krispykreme Have you got a link to these statistics, Emily? I think if you provided some sort of proof it would silence those who are doubting your claims.The facts just made the pro-fat mob change directions.:
A month later, I’m still getting angry doughnut-loving, fat-defending people tweeting at me to let them eat cake (with a hole in the middle.)
I gave up trying to educate the public about weight and getting severely sick and dying from COVID. The backlash was impossible to overcome. It needs to come from a source with enormous influence and funding -- like, say, the national media and the doctors in the federal government. As Maher said perfectly:
If the media and the doctors had made a point to keep saying, but there’s something you can do. But we’ll never know because they never did because the last thing you want to do is say something insensitive. We would literally rather die. Instead, we were told to lock down. Unfortunately the killer was already in the house and her name is Little Debbie.
Facts are tricky things, especially when dealing with a medical/science issues that we are all dependent on the experts to tell us.
Maher also pointed out that the most uneducated group on the science of COVID are those on the Left.
In a recent Gallup survey, Democrats did much worse than Republicans in getting the right answer to the fundamental question: What are the chances that someone who gets COVID will need to be hospitalized?
The answer is between 1- 5%. Forty-one percent of Democrats thought it was over 50 percent. Another 28 percent put the chances at 20 to 49. So almost 70% of Democrats are wildly off on this key question and also have a greatly exaggerated view of the danger of COVID too and the mortality rate among children.
All of which explains why today, the states with the highest share of schools that are still closed are all blue states
I was cheering at my TV when Maher whacked his silent audience with the reality that -- as I reported recently by digging through hidden CDC studies -- no one has gotten COVID from surfaces. (The joke is off-color so watch the video for it.)
He railed against the liberal media for using the pandemic for ratings and clicks.
I think we all know if it bleeds, it leads. The more they can get you to stay inside and watch their panic porn the higher the ratings.
Researchers at Dartmouth built a database recently monitoring the COVID coverage of the major news outlets across the world and found that while other countries mix the good news in with the bad, the U.S. national media reported almost 90% bad news. Even as things were getting better, the reporting remained negative.
If the right-wing media bubble has to own things like climate change denial, shouldn’t liberal media have to answer for how did your audience wind up believing such a bunch of crap about COVID.
The pro host kept at it for more than 7 minutes straight, with just an occasional clap or laugh (mostly when mocking Republicans.) His liberal supporters didn’t like to hear Maher shaming Democratic institutions for fear mongering about COVID and spinning science based on the “Orange Man Bad” philosophy.
I don’t want politics mixed in with my medical decisions. And now that everything is politics, that’s all we do. If their side says “COVID is nothing,” our side has to say “It’s everything.” Trump said it would go away “like a miracle.” And we said it was World War Z.
Maher is right. I’ve marveled this past year how we could politicize a virus. It’s either in your body or not. It makes you sick or not. You would think there was no space for a difference of opinion on COVID.
But what happened was that the public has “learned helplessness”, so they do exactly what the career government doctors -- Dr. Fauci in particular -- prescribe and don’t question authority.
The public will not look at the CDC or HHS websites to educate themselves about updated studies or treatments or vaccine information. They get their news about COVID from the media (polls show), but they don’t trust the media.
As a result, they live in fear and are deliberately helpless. Their frontal lobes aren’t functioning in this state of fight or flight so they can’t take in the facts about the virus.
As Bill Maher summarized to a silent studio audience in the dark: “Those are just facts. I know it’s irresponsible of me to say them.”
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Let’s discuss in the comments: Will it help stop pandemic panic now that Bill Maher is educating his millions of viewers? What else can we do?
Fantastic column! It doesn't surprise me at all that liberals wildly overestimate the hospitalization rate. What I don't understand is how a political movement that was so anti-government in the 60s and 70s can swallow everything the government says a mere 40 years later. At least it's consistent with the march toward socialism, I guess.
One other thing: I worked in the news business for 25 years, 15 of that in national. The condition of press-state collusion in this country makes me pine for the 80s.
Beautifully articulated Emily!