Bill Maher completely jumps the shark
Many would argue that Bill Maher jumped the shark a long time ago, thanks to his frequent and unacceptable remarks about women, Muslims, and other groups. But a lot of liberals still watch him, because even though he’s an offensive jerk, he’s on our side – or is he?
Maher must be feeling like he’s not getting enough attention lately, because he’s now invoking one of the oldest and most dishonest of tropes in all of political punditry: tell the liberals they’re losing the election, and they’ll all come flocking in to find out why. Of course Maher isn’t offering any real reason for this supposed revelation that Trump is magically and secretly winning. He doesn’t need one.
This tactic is not about educating you. It’s not about motivating you to work harder. It’s about making you believe that your candidate is secretly losing, and brainwashing you into believing that the only way your candidate can win is if you spend every day listening to that guy tell you that you’re secretly losing.
When you step back from it, you realize how utterly asinine the whole thing is. No one ever won an election by watching a TV show. Elections are won through voter registration, phone banking, volunteering – not by listening to people like Bill Maher or Michael Moore bloviate about how we’re going to lose no matter what. The whole thing is so preposterous. These types always predict the Republican will win. Then, the 50% of the time the Republican wins, they use their “correct” prediction to land TV spots, sell books, and paint themselves as a modern day Nostradamus. It’s Three-card Monte disguised as political punditry.
And yet fading pundits continue to rely on this old trope, because it keeps working. First you convince your audience the Democrat is losing. Then you convince your audience that the Democrat will only magically win if they keep watching that particular pundit’s doomsday prophecies on TV. Then they convince their audience that if anyone shows up with the facts and explains that we’re actually not losing, that person isn’t being “vigilant” enough, or selling “false hope.”
This “cult of losing” on the liberal side is really no less ridiculous, and no less based in fiction, than the cults that follow Fox News or Donald Trump. It’s also incredibly harmful. No one ever won an election by running around telling anyone who will listen about how their candidate is going to lose. That kind of rhetoric costs your candidate votes. No one is ever motivated to go vote for or volunteer for someone they think is going to lose anyway.
Sadly, thanks to the perverted notion of “vigilance” that most of these doomsday pundits base their narratives around, it can be incredibly hard to break the cycle. But we all need to understand that the people on our side running around yelling “We’re gonna lose” are the most dangerous liability that we face. These types cost us elections. But people like Bill Maher and Michael Moore are perfectly willing to play up this harmful lunacy, because they know it’ll boost their TV ratings. The only way to end the cycle is to stop watching. No one with low ratings stays on TV for very long.
