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Democrats Have a Bill Maher Problem

Establishment Democrats obsessing over Hasan Piker’s every move seem to have no issue talking to Maher, despite his decades of open bigotry.

Bill Maher and Michigan Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin on a March 2026 episode of Real Time With Bill Maher.

This year’s midterm elections have been dominated by debates about whether or not Democrats should associate with popular Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.

The streamer, who is an ardent supporter of Palestinian freedom and dignity, has increasingly lent his platform to progressive challengers running in Democratic primaries. In March, now-Democratic nominee for the Senate in Michigan Abdul el Sayed chose to campaign with Piker, prompting a disingenuous moral panic that persists to this day. The panic is ostensibly related to a list of Piker’s past comments that his detractors claim were misogynistic, antisemitic, and anti-American.

The veracity of the accusations against Piker is questionable, to put it charitably. But while pundits and politicians can’t stop talking about every syllable Piker utters, there’s a truly unrepentant bigot whom establishment Democrats seem to have no problem hanging around with: talk show host, podcaster, and self-described comedian Bill Maher.

Maher’s hatefulness is a matter of extensive public record. For instance, he has a long history of transphobia—part of his persona as a soldier against the supposed hegemony of wokeness. Maher once called trans women who use the women’s bathroom “weirdos peeing” the same week that then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded Obama-era protections for trans students to use the school bathrooms of their choice. He also agreed with Real Time guest Milo Yiannopoulos that “women and girls should be protected from having men who are confused about their sexual identities from their bathrooms,” a perverse insinuation that trans people are more likely to engage in sexual violence, when in fact they are more likely to be the victims of it. And he found himself siding with Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2022, claiming that more young people were openly identifying as trans because “it’s trendy.”

Maher is an equally ardent Islamophobe. In 2014, Maher claimed on his show that Islam “is the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.” (That comment famously drew a rebuke from none other than Ben Affleck.) Just this May, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, condemned Maher for comments he made on his HBO show........

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