Bill Maher devoted his “New Rules” segment on Friday’s “Real Time” to a message of tolerance among all Americans, saying people should try to be more like “Grandma JD Vance.”
He didn’t mean it in a derogatory sense, but rather as a metaphor for tolerance toward other people, inspired by the right-wing Republican vice presidential candidate’s personal memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Maher got there, in large part, starting with an uncanny grasp of the obvious joke.
Maher said he wanted to know “how Americans can be so similar and yet hate each other more than ever.” He recently brought to my attention vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s couch. Oh, I’m sure you’ve heard about it. Some guy tweeted and immediately everyone was on board.
“Our hatred for each other is so intense that we all immediately believed everything bad about the other side. I mean, don’t get me started on them eating dogs. They’re coming to eat all the dogs,” Maher said, referring to the deplorable lies about Haitian-Americans spread by JD Vance. even after admitting on CNN that he knows it’s not true.
“Look, I think JD, Vance is a huge asshole. I’d love to have you on the show anyway. JD,” Maher said as an aside, “but he’s a fucking couch. It’s not in his book, like.” “Rumor has it that what goes on between a man and a cover is none of my business, but in this case, it wasn’t.”
Now we need to take a moment to correct Maher’s mistake. Contrary to what he says in the “New Rules” segment, no one actually believes that JD Vance has sex with couch potatoes. The guy who first told the joke even explained in an interview that that was the point. that (in his opinion) Vance is a scoundrel that “gives off” that kind of vibe, and the fact that the joke came about, mainly because a lot of people agreed that Vance looks like that kind of person.
Whether you think this joke is funny or scary, it should be clear that no one has ever seriously suggested that it is true. Everyone understood exactly what it was: a joke in bad taste. From someone who also has this happen to them. Tell malicious and racist lies about immigrants which led to the creation of a small town in the state of Ohio largely blocked by terrorist threats inspired by this lie.
But back to Maher, who cited Vance’s book to make his big point. “One of the most interesting passages in that book is when Vance recalls that at age eight he thought he might be gay… Eight-year-old Vance goes to his grandmother… and asks her if she’s a woman. In Kentucky in 1933, he’s thought to be gay.
“She was like, ‘JD, do you want to suck dick?’” Maher continued. “And she was like, ‘No, Mom.’ And she was like, ‘So you’re not gay, and even if you did want to suck dick,’ it would be nice, God still loves you.”
Maher said it was a “teachable moment” for others. He then devoted much of “The New Rules” to examples of what he saw as tolerance and open-mindedness in red states.
She then concluded: “Why don’t we resist our worst impulses and the next time we are tempted to hate and just want the other person to die, stop, pause, and think of Grandma JD Vance? She told us that maybe we are not so different after all.”
Check it all out below:
