Bill Maher and Guests Debate Booster Shots on "Real Time"

Bill Maher took to the stage for a mid-August Real Time episode to wild applause. That’s been a feature of many an episode this year, and the reaction has wound up getting a mixed reaction from Maher himself more often than not. “You’re very happy, for people who lost a war,” he said — and so the evening’s monologue began. Maher also noted that the score was currently “Graveyard of Empires 3, Empires 0,” which segued into a larger discussion on American foreign policy.

The collapse of the government in Afghanistan gave Maher space to address a few of his preferred themes — the cost of the war, the surrealism that Biden is being blamed for a decision that had largely been a bipartisan consensus and a reminder of Donald Trump’s time in office. (This included Trump looking into the prospect of meeting with the Taliban.) From there, Maher pivoted to riffs on the pandemic, booster shots and OnlyFans’ recent move to remove explicit content. It was a relatively concise monologue, which suggested Maher was leaving plenty of room for his guests – which seemed appropriate, as all of them are figures with plenty to say.

Up first? Political writer and blogger Andrew Sullivan, whose Out on a Limb: Selected Writing, 1989-2021 was published earlier this month. The two hugged, sat and proceeded to converse — and while both men are prone to fulminations over cancel culture, the subject that began their conversation was a far less contentious one: weed. They chatted briefly about a joint they’d shared at some previous gathering. (“We love our weed,” Sullivan said.) And from there, the two spoke about the practice of keeping a notebook for ideas one has while high. (Maher admitted that one of his was, “Open a ketchup restaurant.”) And Maher hailed Sullivan for holding the record for Real Time appearances — this was his 27th overall.

Sullivan talked about his departure from New York, which he described as a firing. “I was given four days’ notice,” he recalled. “I was nominated for a Pulitzer one year, and the next year, fired.” He spoke about being less frustrated with angry people on social media than he was with those in positions of power who heeded those voices. Sullivan also mentioned that one of his reasons for putting Out on a Limb together was to make a case for his own ideological position. “You’re making me out to be some crazy-ass right-winger,” he said. “Look at my work! It’s much more complicated than that.”

Later in the conversation, Maher shifted subjects to the pandemic. And given that Sullivan has lived with HIV for 28 years, his thoughts on disease as a constant in life made for an interesting shift in tone. Sullivan prefaced his remarks by stressing the importance of being vaccinated. “I’m triple-vaccinated,” he explained. From there, he made the case for thinking of COVID-19 as endemic — and, to that end, he also argued that the vaccinated shouldn’t have mask or distancing mandates.

The panel brought together a pair of speakers with plenty of expertise in their chosen fields. Max Rose is the former Special Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Defense for COVID-19; Jackie Calmes is the author of Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court. Rose is also a veteran who fought in Afghanistan; that Maher brought up the current situation there first was no surprise.

Maher raised many of the same concerns he did last episode, when it came to the money spent by the Pentagon over the last 20 years and the corruption it led to. Rose pointed out that many of the most hawkish voices who support spending massive amounts of money to transform Afghanistan wouldn’t support similar money being spent on improving conditions in the United States — and that led to a broader conversation about political hypocrisy, as Maher read statements by Trump-supporting politicians exorciating Biden for carrying out the American withdrawal from Afghanistan Trump had set in motion.

Discussion moved from there to the Supreme Court, with Calmes discussing Associate Justice Stephen Breyer’s decision not to retire — which, she said, has angered a number of Democratic politicians. Rose, who previously served in the House, made an emphatic case for the importance of term limits on the Supreme Court. Rose also noted that he could see Maher nominated for the Supreme Court. “Oh, you’re adorable,” Maher replied.

The California recall election sparked a sense of frustration and even outright despair from the panel, with Maher citing it as evidence of a growing refusal to accept the results of elections. He went on to note that a win for Larry Elder could have massive national ramifications should Elder have to appoint a replacement for one of the state’s two Senators. “It’s an insane system,” said Rose. “I’m proud that I’m a New Yorker.”

For Rose, this also spoke to a sense of a lack of trust in government — something also embodied by the partisan divide over COVID-19 vaccinations. Calmes raised the question of whether this was even possible, with very partisan media ecosystems in place. And things took a turn — first with a discussion of the way hospitals are run, and then with Maher returning to his frustration with obesity and his hope that government might do more to combat it, from public health initiatives to not subsidizing sugar manufacturers.

When the subject of booster shots came up, Maher expressed his skepticism. “Every eight months, you’re going to put this shi*t in me?” he asked. “Maybe I don’t need one”

“Yeah, I lost you, man,” Rose said. “That’s crazy.” And, following some crosstalk, Rose kept pushing. “I’m rolling the dice. I know I’m in your house, and I don’t want to step over the line here. But, genuinely, people’s lives are on the line. And just as significantly, our way of life is on the line here.”

“I do think that it’s very dangerous to enter into a conversation here about personal responsibility, when the truth of the matter is, this is a matter of collective responsibility,” he continued.

New Rules found Maher revisiting some familiar targets — TikTok influencers, the Taliban and Rudy Giuliani among them. The bulk of the segment, however, found him criticizing Apple’s decision to scan through photos stored on phones for evidence of child abuse. This, Maher argued, is unconstitutional and leaves the door open for abuses of power. It’s also, as he described it, a sign that smartphones have too much power over their users — alternately, in his words, that “today’s phones make people assholes, full stop.”

Maher went on to cite phones’ effect on their users’ mental health and demeanor — to say nothing of the similarities to addiction that some have experienced when it comes to their phones. “The phones made us passive-aggressive to our friends and hyper-aggressive to total strangers,” he said. And while he closed the segment on a self-deprecating note, this critique hit home in a way that few of Maher’s closing segments have recently.