Maherthusianism

Comedian Bill Maher's misanthropy and ignorance about climate change shines front and center in his Club Random episode with Patrick Bet-David

Warning: This post contains several instances of foul language meaning it’s likely NFSW and not appropriate for younger readers. Please use your own discretion.

I. “Humans are not good people”

“Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.”

- Thomas Sowell

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NYC born Bill Maher is a prominent comedian, political commentator, and television host. His first national show, “Politically Incorrect,” began airing in 1993 but was canceled in 2002. After that he signed a contract with HBO to air “Real Time with Bill Maher,” which remains in production today. Maher, a (supposed) staunch opponent of religion also produced the film Religulous in 2008. He also does stand up comedy shows and hosts his own long form podcast “Club Random.”

Maher has been a life long bachelor and has expressed over the years his desire to never have children, he’s a supporter of animal rights, and claims to want to “protect the environment.” He believes that humans have impacted the environment too much as readers will soon well find out. He’s also no fan of hydrocarbons. In a 2010 Real Time segment, he compared the oil and gas industry to child pornography and during times of layoffs in the hydrocarbon industry he’s screamed “go take a solar job” to laid off workers.

In other words Maher takes what

Alex Epstein

has called the “Anti-Impact Framework” to heart.

Maher to his credit has also been on the record calling out many “pro-environmental” moves that amount to little more than virtue signaling such as reusable grocery bags, paper straws, gas stove bans, and the hypocrisy behind celebrities and politicians for lecturing everybody else on environmental issues while themselves using private jets for travel.

But there’s a sinister catch in his views that lie at the intersection of Coastal Elite pathology and Malthusianism.

He insists that “what didn’t work” in terms of environmental actions to fix and/or reverse climate change has been “asking people to be good.”

What’s “good” in Maher’s worldview? That’s an open question for now.

Maher, apparently not being human himself, lectured his audience in a segment of New Rule last summer.

When you tell humans if you do these environmentally friendly things we can all continue to live, their response is ‘what's in it for me?’

So just to be clear I do still believe very much that Climate Change is an emergency but I don't think we're going to win it by grocery shopping with a laundry bag… or banning the gas stoves… or imagining a human can really drink this [milk shake] through a paper straw.

Scrolling on your phone can use more energy in a day than the refrigerator but no one is going to give that up.

We'd have to go back to having sex with people we know.

And we all must be aware by now that what buying everything from Amazon does to the environment. But do we stop? No.

The verdict is in: humans are not good people.

Maher rages against the many things taken for granted as “planet saving measures” especially by the do-gooder Coastal Elites but fails to really say what actually matters.

Typical of Hollywood types, his personal life doesn’t set much of an example either. Maher himself lives in the semi-arid hills above Los Angeles on a multi acre lot in a mansion with seven bedrooms. The kitchen has multiple gas stoves, the yard has a large swimming pool, and same yard is full of lush trees and grass.

Maher’s citadel of narcissism is well away from all the de-civilization he bitches about on his show. Despite the horrible conditions down below the hills caused by Progressive ideology, Maher “loves” California’s Progressive leader Governor Gavin Newsom, which is to be expected, since scumbags tend to love each other’s company.

It probably helps too that Newsom regime grants Hollywood gracious taxbreaks even when the State of California is in the budget doldrums.

Maher also owns a second home on the environmentally sensitive Catalina Island. The island’s electricity is produced by a large diesel generating power plant owned by Southern California Edison. He also gleefully admits to using private jets in his personal travel.

Maher been a life long bachelor, and while that’s of course a personal choice he’s well within his right to make. But most humans over the course of their lifetime choose to enrich their lives in a romantic relationship with someone else, and furthermore if the couple choose to have (or adopt children) they tend to take a very different perspective on the world. Parents tend to expand their circle of care to their spouses, children, and children’s children making Maher’s “what’s in it for me,” nonsensical projection largely vacant. Maher also has a sister who also apparently has no children of her own leaving him without nieces or nephews. Given Maher’s position with PETA, he’s likely not a fan of being a “parent” to a “fur baby” either.

Off the Real-Time record (largely written by taxpayer-subsidized Unions), Maher’s record isn’t much different. In fact without a script, a time limit, and an audience, Maher can get far more deranged.

On a recent episode of his Club Random Podcast, his guest was Patrick Bet-David, an Iranian American entrepreneur, conservative leaning commentator, and host and creator of the popular YouTube channel Valuetainment.

The entire one hour forty three minute podcast is a master class in two competing forms of conversation: one that consists of dominating garbeldygook authoritarianism and another in genuine truth seeking .

Well into the episode, the two get in to discussing family, with Maher asking about Bet-David’s family:

Bill Maher (BM): Um so you’ve been married for how.. 14 years?

Patrick Bet David (PBD): 14 years, yeah.

BM: 14 years.

PBD: Yeah, we got four kids.

BM (raises voice): Four kids!

PBD: I’d have 20 if I could. We got 11, uh.

BM: Why do you want 20 kids?

PBD: 10, 7, 2…

BM: Why do you want so many kids?

PBD: What’s the purpose of living if you don’t have kids?

BM: Seriously?

PBD: Yeah!

BM: Okay, again the way you frame it is just off-putting because it’s like, it’s like assuming all of us, and we’re so varied as a human race, that all of us think the same way. So for many of millions and millions of people, the purpose of living is to avoid having children… is to enjoy your life.

The idea that human beings, as with any other living creature have an innate desire to reproduce and pass on their legacy to the next generation seems to cause a moral kernel panic in the mind of Maher. He apparently can’t imagine the fact that over the course of a person’s lifetime, it’s the normal condition on average to want to find a mate and reproduce.

Maher, to some credit, acknowledges that some people do want to be parents, and that for those who do so, they should love and cherish their children. He also argues that people should not be forced to have children.

Then he continues with an ultimate but:

BM: …But generally I’m not in love with the human race, where I think like, woah, what we need is more of them.

PBD: Do you like kids? Do you actually like kids?

BM: (laughing and throwing his hands back) Why do you ask me this question? For of course I don’t like kids.

PBD: You asked me questions about kids, I’m asking your questions about kids.

BM: But I just told you. Ok, no I fucking hate kids. And I and I understand people like you… you… can enjoy yours. I’m glad you like yours. Um and I understand we have to… well I don’t really have to but but okay if we “human race“ going, um, we have to keep having children. It doesn’t matter whether we should or shouldn’t, people are going to do it and if there’s one thing we know about this world it’s that people will fuck. They’ll fuck anything. They’ll fuck anybody…

Maher can’t seem to keep his position straight.

Maybe all that weed has killed a few brain cells? (Off tangent: Maher has been a life long weed user but also a life-long supporter of War on Drugs politicians such as Joe Biden and Kamila Harris. So while Maher has been toking in his Hollywood citadel for decades, hundreds of thousands of regular people have gone to prison over possession of the same plant thanks to the politicians he supports.)

The two continue and Patrick Bet-David seemingly understanding how to push Maher’s buttons in response to Maher asserting (a typical abuse tactic of CA Coastal Elites and Progressives) Bet-David is a climate change denier.

BM: …because I got, and am still very concerned about global warming… or is um that a hoax in your world? I don’t know.

PBD: I lose sleep over it every night.

BM: You what?

PBD: I lose sleep over it every night.

BM: I don’t know whether you’re being facitious

PBD: Oh my God, I shiver every night when I go to sleep. Are you… global warming

BM: I assume you’re being sarcastic?

PBD: I would be very serious. Why would I be sarcastic? I mean global warming? It’s the number one issue in the world.

BM: Ok, good.

PBD: Do you agree with that?

BM: I do.

PBD: Tell me why.

BM: See! I think you don’t. Why? Because I um few..

PBD: What are you worred about?

BM: A few years ago someone did a, um, a…

PBD: Al Gore?

BM: Al Gore, yes. You’re right, you’re right David. You know what? It’s a big hoax because Al Gore has a big house and sometimes he leaves lights on in it. Oh my God, um no. Someone did a compendium of all the climate studies… there was over 10…I think over 10,800…180 of them something like that and there was only two dissenting about the idea that climate change was real and it was happening and it was caused by humans. So that’s a consensus. That’s what you call a consensus. I mean you and I think are closer on the same page with vaccines and so forth like and that’s because the human body is a lot more complicated and a lot more mysterious than climate science. That’s why there’s nowhere near that kind of consensus about how we treat any malady in the human body. That is the bottom of the ocean. Not so with the climate, it’s not that complicated… the climate…I mean I couldn’t do it but climate science, it’s geology, and it’s chemistry, and it’s some physics. It’s not a mystery like why do people get Parkinson’s disease. It just isn’t. So, um, ah shit, what was your question?

Maher really exposes his ignorance here. Are the fields of geology, chemistry, and “some” physics are less complicated than the human body? He also fails to understand the fact that truth is not established by a consensus.

They continue, with Maher going off on another tirade, not allowing in Bet-David to speak.

PBD: (laughs) Climate change, no we were…

BM: Climate change yes, but but but, when over 10,000 uh scientists all study the same subject and come up to the same conclusion and two don’t, uh you can, yes you can say um, there’s a dissenting field but they could fit on a motorcycle. So yes, I think it’s very and again we see the results already I mean it…now is it possible that we can raise the level of the ocean and not be met with disaster because of that? I guess it is. I mean I guess there are also things that could also change but that’s going to happen. It’s kind of like when the Titanic hit the iceberg and she talks to Victor Garmer and he says, “Well, lady I hate to tell you but uh there’s nine compartments on this ship and if only four of them had flooded we’d be good but five did and that means we’re going down. We’re just going to go down. So, uh it’s unlikely that you have some sort of lover you care about on the ship but if you do now would be a good time to run…

Notice Maher initially said those where ten thousand plus studies and then switched to scientists.

Either way, this isn’t what Maher feels it means.

After more incomprehensible vomit from Maher, Bet-David tries to get him to explain how he’d fix climate change.

Naturally, it takes Maher forever to get, well, nowhere. His “people not good” grunting returns.

PBD: How do you think we fix this? So, like you know we have uh uh I think it’s uh, it’s fair to say there’s a lot of weird things going on too, weather’s around the world, right? Like not you know weather around the world. Hurricanes, you know San Diego you’re seeing videos and you say oh Germany what is all this stuff I mean this is too crazy right now to be looking at. The other day I’m in Ft. Lauderdale, a tornado hit Fort Lauderdale. Okay. These are kind of weird things that’s going on simultaneously what’s the solution, how do we fix it? You know what is the approach to take it, I think that becomes the question, right? You identify the problem then you sit there and say what is the solution?

BM: Yeah I agree. Of course. I mean that’s exactly what we’re talking about and no, I don’t think it’s always about throwing money at the problem. Um, I also don’t think I.. this was something we did about a year ago. I also don’t think that the method that we have basically been using or trying to use for the longest time which is “make people be good, or want to be good” plainly is not working. I think the amount of coal we burned 30 years ago was like 38% of grid but now it was now at the last year it was 37, you know like we shaved one point off of it. Um, so I don’t know what the answer is, um and I’m not encouraging people to be pigs but apparently they’re going to be… it’s just in our nature to be fucking pigs and to pig out on convenience and luxury and excess. You know, maybe it’s because it gets you laid, I don’t know what the fuck but pe… or makes you I don’t know, shopping and people just like… shit. They like buying shit and making shit, and and they just do. They like live their fucking life and sometimes the result is not great for the environment anyway I mean I fly in a private jet. You probably do too. I’ve said before, I can be called a ban environmenalist, I cannot be called a hypocrite. So I’m not going to say I’m the greatest environmentalist and I’m also not going to, I couldn’t do these gigs I do and I wouldn’t even though I was taking it somewhere for pleasure. Fuck that! You know what? Yes there’s a certain part of me that’s going to live life while I’m here. Look! If I thought it was really making a difference to the trillion flights or whatever it is every day that are criss-crossing the globe, you know make it illegal if it’s really.. and they’re not going to do that. So the point, the bottom line is that we’re going to have to think of something. Because making humans not act selfishly is just, it’s like that’s what communism tried to do. It tried to make people not act selfishly and that is never, that was never going to work. Humans are selfish.

Maher is just all over the place. He can’t define for the life of him what “being good” would actually mean and even if he did, what are the odds he would still be unsatisifed even if a Genie with a magic wand magically forced all of humanity to “be good?”

Someone who is a suck up to horrible human beings such as Gavin Newsom has no place in lecturing the majority of the human population about “being good.”

It’s worth mentioning, it’s odd he conflates humans and pigs, as he’s been PETA’s (oops, sorry) bitch for decades.

His stats on coal are also pulled out of his ass.

It takes a certain level of delusion too to believe that his actions are not hypocritical but then again this is coming from a Newsom Brownnoser.

PBD: I think to me, that’s the part of what I like about long-form podcasts or debates is because the more we talk, if you can reason, you’re gonna come to a conclusion and what conclusion do we come here from climate uh change? Neither one of us are expers in the this topic, your’re not a scientist, I’m not a scientist. We haven’t spent 20-30 years of our lives thinking about the..

BM: The science isn’t the question. People know what the science is. When you’re debating the science, it means you just have a weak hand and you want to do what you want to do and that’s fine. But the science is in, there’s no debating the science anymore. That was my point about the 10,800 peer-reviewed studies that all came to basically came to the same conclusion. The science is in on it. Yes the debate is what do we do about it. Or do we just like you know tell Luuise it and hold hands and drive off the Grand Canyon and say “you know what as long we we’re gone we’re going to go out strong.” But I don’t want to be the one to tell India and China who have been watching the rest of the world pollute forever, oh you know now “I’m so sorry it’s a very bad situation, you can’t have refigeration or uh air conditioning or cars cause we used all that up.” Sorry, that’s not going to happen. Everybody in the world wants to live like Americans.

Maher, again could not tell what science was if it smacked his own face. For being someone famous for not allegedly being religious, Maher here shows he instead worships at the alter of Scientism. Real science is never “in” and it’s constantly in debate.

As for a debate on what to do about climate change? Maher presents no such room for such discussion.

(Regarding “no debate” the excellent

Andrew Doyle

just addressed this very issue in his latest Substack piece. )

Maher continues to press his “humans are pigs” vomit.

PBD: …Okay, so climate change debate…we know we have a problem, this is what’s going on. Fine! 10,800 you know research you know scientists, great, let’s agree on that, that’s exactly what’s going on. Now what do we do? So what if scientists come back and say the way for us to save civilization is we have to bring the population back down to 3 billion. Do you agree with that strategy?

BM (interrupting with glee): Oh, I’d love it. I’d love to take part in it.

PBD: You’d like to take part in it?

BM: There’s way too many people.

PBD: So you think there’s way too many people?

BM: Of course. I mean not to fit but for resources see this is the silly argument that the population expanders like to give.. like we’ve got plenty of room. Yes of course we do, no contest, we’ve got plenty of room. Ever fly over the country? It’s mostly empty. Yes, like your head. Mostly empty. That’s not the issue. We could fit them in, we can’t feed them. They all shit. They use water. You can’t grow water. There’s already a water shortage in this world. There’s a water shortage out here before Gavin got in office and made it rain.

Maher’s nonsense is of course is nothing new - his worldview about humans, the planet, and how to “fix” whatever issues that keep him up at night are derived from Malthusianism and Neo-Malthusianism.

II. Not Such Good People

“Of course, once one decides the world has too many people, all manner of cruel solutions suddenly become justifiable, especially if the expendable ones live in a far-off land and don’t look like you. It takes no special knowledge of history to connect the dots from the Malthusian school of thought to some of the cruelest and most regrettable episodes of our collective past.”

-Doomberg

Thomas Malthus and the cover of his An Essay on the Principle of Population

This by no means seeks to be a comprehensive analisys of potential sources of Maher’s anti-human delusions but freakout about too many humans and too few resources, is a concept made famous by British economist Thomas Malthus in the shadow of the Enlightenment. Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 where he argued that the exponential (geometric) growth of the human population would outstrip what he believed was linear (arithmetic) growth of the food supply.

The Malthusian Trap | Wikipedia

Malthus said this prior to many of the advancements of the industrial revolution and well before the inventions or discoveries of modern fertilizers, productive farming techniques, Green Revolution, and the discovery of cheap and dense energy sources via hydrocarbons and nuclear energy. His “solution” to prevent overpopulation and a strain for such limited resources was population control, both at the young and old spectrum in what he called a preventative check and a positive check. The preventative check included demanding people be celibate and have fewer children (Malthus was also proponent of abstinence but against birth control seeing as it conflicted with God), while the positive check took into account letting people die famine-induced hunger, disease outbreaks, and war. Malthus also believed in keeping poor people intentionally poor so they could not advance to consuming more resources although paradoxically he also claimed to be concerned about the very poor.

Malthus’ ideas largely contrbuted to the Irish Famine in the mid 1840s. Despite a fungus being the cause of the infamous rot of the Irish potato crop, Irish farmers had up until that point produced plenty of livestock but all was exported to England even during the famine. Malthus blamed the famine on overpopulation writing, “The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.” British-occupied India during the Victorian Era was accused by British “Intellectuals” for producing far too many people thus depleting the soil. The region saw several famines during British Rule in what is controversially described as the Late Victorian Holocausts.

Malthus’ overall overpopulation and resource depletion ideas never died despite being disproven time and time again. Instead, like a dormant volcano they rumbled over the decades into Neo-Malthusianiam after being brewed by the Progressive Era. As covered in Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era by Thomas C. Leonard and in The Progressive Era by Murray Rothbard both eugenics and population control were key components of the Progressive Era. Eugenics and population control (often using forced sterilization) were often seen by Progressives (and Conservatives) as ways to craft the human species into what they viewed were as “correct races” as if humans could be compared to breeds of dogs, cattle, or in Maher’s case - pigs. The eugenics movement in the United States was in fact so diabolical that individuals representing Nazi Germany wrote a letter of thanks to the California-based Human Betterment Foundation.

Spawning from the Progressive Era was the beginning of the Environmental Movement, which has plenty of skeletons in its closet. One of America’s first environmentalists was Madison Grant. Grant is famous for his push to create several national parks, save or preserve species such as the American bison, California redwoods, bald eagles, and whales, but he was also a notorious supporter of “preserving” the “Nordic master race” by the use of eugenics and forced birth control. The eugenics movement’s supporters also sought to sterilize people with cognitive or intellectual disabilities and racial or ethnic minorities such as Native Americans and African Americans. Grant believed the Nordics were superior to other races due to their apparent appreciation for the natural environment and despite a slight disagreement who belonged to the “master race,” Hitler himself deeply admired Grant’s book The Passing of the Great Race and took Malthus’ ideas to heart Chapter 4 of Mein Kampf. Grant and another environmentalist at the time, Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr., a Princton NJ born "distinguished Aryan enthusiast," eugenics supporter and conservationist also helped fund John Muir’s Sierra Club. John Maynard Keynes was also a proponent of eugenics and population control.

Madison Grant and his infamous pro-eugenics book.

Pure race eugenics (pun not intended) fell out of favor after it became associated with Nazis after WWII but population control largely in the use of forced sterilization continued to be popular among the Intellectuals and Elites. Post WWII population control ideology began to focus more on the belief than humans were overpopulating and impacting the planet past the point of no return. Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr. published the book Our Plundered Planet in 1946 along with The Limits of the Earth in 1953, and a collection of essays by others called Our Crowded Planet in 1962. William Voigt’s Road to Survival was published in 1948 further pushing what later became labeled as apocalyptic environmentalism. Voigt further insisted capitalism was in part to blame for degradation of the planet and wanted to use multi-national organizations such as the newly formed United Nations to control the flow of resources via an “Ecological Commission.”

Inspired by both Voight and Osborn Jr.’s books, inspired the Big Daddy of them all - Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was published in 1968 with support from the Sierra Club. In The Population Bomb Ehrlich predicted mass famine resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people by the 1970s due to overpopulation and lack of resources insisting the problem was too many people, too little food, and a dying planet.

He opens the first chapter of the book describing a trip to India. Maher’s rhetoric sounds remarkably simililar.

The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. 'People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob, hand hom squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect.

The book quickly became a best seller in part thanks to late night talk show host Johhny Carson bringing Ehrlich onto his show as a guest several times.

The shortest chapter in The Population Bomb

Ehrlich (and his wife) published several updates to The Population Bomb over the years and Ehrlich himself has long been a star of the environmental hysterics. Ehrlich was also highly influential on getting the United Nations’ so-called “sustainable development” to not focus on infrastructure development projects in the Global South with UN money instead going to local charities. Of course the 1970s came and gone with little to none of Ehrlich’s predictions coming true. He lost the infamous Simon–Ehrlich Wager in 1990 and he still beats the same drum of doom and gloom today well into his 90s. Ehrlich was and remains a staunch opponent of cheap energy sources, especially nuclear energy. He’s said that cheap energy for humanity in general is akin to ”giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

Ehrlich’s energy remarks run parallel to several other environmental thinkers of the time who insisted it was actually cheap energy that would cause humans to ruin the planet. Amory Lovins for example wrote, “It’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean, and abundant energy.”

Of course all this existed prior to climate change catastorphism - the prime issue of the current era.

III. No Rules

“Hollywood might be a bad place to base either a set of ethics to aspire to or a set of ethics which should be regarded as particularly emblematic of anything beyond the entertainment industry.”

-Douglas Murray

It’s hard to get into the mind of Bill Maher. He’s likely a far more complicated person than anyone can decipher based off a podcast episode and a few clips from his various television shows. But it seems clear he has a sinister view on humanity and our impact on the planet as do many elites in Hollywood and Hollywood is not known for it morals and ethics. His views and those of others in Hollywood are likely inspired whether they know it or not by the long multi-century shitstream of Malthusian thought along with inspiration from modern Climate Crisis hysteria. Maher, to his credit, is well known for inviting a diverse set of guests both on Real Time and on Club Random. If only he could engage in a bit more intellectual humility, he might be open to changing his mind.