Versión Español
Spanish – I have been following Bill Maher for years. He is one of the wittiest and comical guys on television. But above all, he is also brave.
I started watching Real Time after some terrorist attacks —Charlie Hebdo if I correctly remember— because he was one of the few courageous people on American prime time who dared to call a spade a spade: Islamic fundamentalism. Then there is his interview with the very important and undaunted Ayaan Hirsi Ali and also the one he did with the Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz. In both of these interviews, the “I’s” of Islam were pointed out. And there is that deadlock he had with the foolish Ben Affleck. Maher threw some truth bombs at him: Islam is, at present, the mother lode of bad ideas.
Maher’s greatest merit is that even though he is a liberal —in the American sense— he speaks the truth that makes those same liberals so uncomfortable. He is not a Republican; he is a Democrat. But he says the Democratic Party looks more like a circus than a party. How could Trump not win if everyone on the other side is a clown? Bill Maher raised this question in one of his addresses.
Bill Maher told his latest uncomfortable and grim truth on April 10: it is not racism to hold China responsible for the “Chinese virus” pandemic. Yes, “Chinese virus,” as Trump also called it. It sparked the outrage of the entire progressive establishment. Why? Because “scientists, who are generally pretty liberal, have been naming diseases after the places where they came from for a very long time. Zika is from the Zika forest; Ebola- from the Ebola river; Hantavirus, the Hanten river. There is the West Nile virus, Guinea worm, and rocky mountain spotted fever and, of course, the Spanish flu. MERS, which stands for Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, is plastered all over airports, and no one blogs about it. So why should China get a pass?
“Can’t we even have a pandemic without getting offended?” Maher wonders, outraged. And he is right. It is pathetic. And the problem with those who are offended, and enthusiastically determined to prevent the Chinese virus from being called “the Chinese virus,” is that ultimately, they are proposing that we whitewash China’s responsibility in making the world suffer.
“Seriously, it scares me: there are people out there who would rather die from the virus than call it something they think is wrong,” says Maher. “This is not about vilifying a culture. This is about facts. This is about life and death,” he says.
In his monologue, Maher denounced the unhealthy practices of Asian culture, which contributed in some way to the emergence of the coronavirus. It is acute and confronts those who relativize everything.
“The PC police say it is racist to attack any cultural practice that is different than our own. I think liberalism lost its way when it started thinking like that and pretended that forcing a woman to wear this (burka) was just ‘a different way’ and not an abhorrent human rights violation.”
“It is not racist to point out that eating bats is batshit crazy. We should blame China, not Chinese Americans. But we can’t stop telling the truth because the racists get the wrong idea. There are always going to be idiots out there who want to indulge their prejudices, but this is an emergency,” he insisted.
The famous presenter continued the program, referring to those who warned about what would happen in Wuhan. He denounced the authoritarian practices of the Chinese regime, which, at the start of the year, made an effort not to contain the pandemic but to suppress information.
Of course, some of them are already screaming at the top of their lungs. In an article in the Daily Beast, editor Marlow Stern called Bill Maher a “despicable racist.” He accused Maher of inciting hate speech.
Bill Maher is right about China, and the American liberals won’t forgive him. They do not forgive him for speaking the truth, for saying that the Asian communist regime is the great culprit of the coronavirus pandemic. Nor do they forgive him for not submitting to ideological narratives. This shows that Maher is a truly free man and one of the most talented and courageous personalities on television.
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