In Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher criticized the “Orwellian” redefinition of words such as “hate,” “violence,” “and white supremacy.”
Maher said, “George Carlin famously had seven words you can’t say on television. Well, here are my eight words that people need to stop redefining: hatred, victim, hero, shame, violence, survivor, -phobia and white supremacy.
He continued: “Comedian Hannah Gadsby has labeled Dave Chappelle’s controversial Netflix special as‘ hate speech whistling a dog[.]Well, ‘dog whistle’ refers to when someone puts things into code because they’re afraid to come out and say what they really mean. Is that what you get from Dave Chappella? To be afraid to say what he really thinks? And it’s not hate speech just because you don’t agree with it, nor is it -phobic. “
He added: “Even in the category, we just don’t like it, so we just pretend it’s something else, the word ‘violence.’ … Violence is when it hurts. It usually involves leaving some kind of trace. Of course, countless things can lead to violence, but I’m sorry, you can’t take that word and use it for things that are just scary or just words, which I literally learned in kindergarten. “
He further stated: “In 2010 The New York Times used the term ‘white superintendent’ 75 times. Last year? More than 700 times. Some of this is certainly because Trump has emerged and encouraged a faction of this country that is truly white. Of course, it’s still the right thing to do. However, this should not apply to something as suggested by more than a few to get rid of the SAT test. Now, if we find that the SAT test is tilted so that the deck folds in favor of whites, if there are questions like: ‘Biff and Chip are sailing on a twelve-knot yacht to Ed Sheeran’s concert at Catalina – if Catalina 26 miles away, how many white claws should they bring? ‘ Yeah, then maybe yes. Of course, the SAT does not have such issues. So it becomes a kind of ridiculous exaggeration that makes common sense fans roll their eyes and then vote for Trump. Are there snowflakes on the right? Of course, there is no more crying little bitch than Trump himself. But things like that stick to the left a lot more. “
Maher concluded, “You can try to change the seriousness by changing the words, but you can’t. It just prevents me from dealing with it. One of the bad guys in ‘Four Ninety-Eighty’ says, ‘[T]The whole goal of new speech is to narrow the scope of thought[.]’Yeah, that’s Orwell’s. And you know how they say, Orwell never ends well.
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