The topics covered on Bill Maher‘s Real Time on Friday were no laughing matter – inflation, crime, the suppression of free speech, the war in Ukraine, antisemitism on campus.
One area of special interest was when the talk turned to crime. Guest Jane Ferguson, an award-winning special correspondent for PBS NewsHour, contributor to The New Yorker, and author of the book No Ordinary Assignment, was randomly attacked on a New York subway.
Her fellow panelist, John Avlon, senior political analyst and anchor at CNN and the former editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast, noted how “we brought down crime in the mid-1990s.
We seem to have forgotten a lot of those lessons.” Maher then made a somewhat surprising confession, bringing up Jason Aldean’s song Try That In A Small Town, a country anthem that dares miscreants to try various antisocial activities and “see how far ya make it down the road.” “I ain’t mad at it,” Maher said of the song, adding that “I wish we could have that in big cities,” with the caveat that “crime in red states is just as high.” Earlier, Maher had a one-on-one with Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and coauthor of The Canceling of the American Mind.
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