Bill Maher of HBO’s obnoxious “Real Time” is being reviled and repudiated by his mostly Trump-Hate obsessed fans because of the clip above, where he appeared to say sincerely, in effect, “Gee, President Trump doesn’t seem like such a bad guy after all when you meet him!” But Bill Maher doesn’t say anything sincerely. I have pointed this out more than once in 2025: like so many media-dependent weasels before him, Maher has made the ruthless calculation that simply bashing everything Trump does now will make him just another screaming voice among the Deranged, so he has to find a more nuanced identity if he’s going to get headlines. Despite the fact that he had cheered on the worst of the Angry Left’s stunts and outrages for years and derided anyone with an (R) next to their name as a (I’m quoting now) fascist, idiot, liar, “cunt” (for the women) or worse, now he is suddenly a voice of fairness and moderation.

The tale of the Scorpion and the Frog comes to mind. Maher was never a legitimate pundit, and his favor can be easily purchased with a ticket to notoriety. With Democrats thoroughly disgracing themselves daily, it didn’t take much analysis for a professional iconoclast to conclude that the smart move was to buck the Blue.

But Bill’s cynical flip-flop risks triggering an ethics train wreck. Over-the-hill curmudgeon Larry David wrote a nauseating “humorous” op-ed for, of course, the New York Times called “My Dinner With Adolf,” attacking Maher for accepting an invitation to dine with the President of the United States. Then such normally rational figures as CNN’s token conservative Scott Jennings and Mediaite founder Dan Abrams wasted their breath to attack David for attacking Maher. Even Alan Dershowitz got into the act, blustering, ridiculously, “You know, Larry David, that’s a form of Holocaust denial. Comparing Trump to Hitler is a form of Holocaust denial because Trump didn’t have gas chambers, he didn’t have shooting squads, he didn’t take babies, and throw them into ovens, and if you’re making a comparison what you’re saying is Hitler didn’t have any of those things either. So shame — shame — on you Larry David. You know, we used to be friends, boy. No more. And the one thing: about Larry David he stopped being funny, I don’t laugh at his jokes anymore because I know they’re not jokes. That’s who he really is, so they’re not jokes….”

Perhaps the most hypocritical of all, however, was Broadway diva Patti Lupone, who went all Rodney King over Bill being skewered for his fake Trump-love. In multiple venues she bemoaned the lack of tolerance for dissenting views. “What I don’t understand about all of this in this country is we can’t seem to have a dialogue, a diverse dialogue or a dissenting views dialogue,” the “Evita” actress said. Don’t cry for Bill Patti Lupone! I am grateful that conservative Hollywood reporter Christian Toto called out LuPone’s hypocritical virtue-signaling so I didn’t have to.

“Her fellow progressives helped make our lack of civil discourse possible,” he writes, accurately. “It’s no accident that a liberal like David would try to “cancel” Maher for having dinner with a sitting President from the “wrong” party. The Left powered Cancel Culture for years, punishing those who held “problematic” reviews and ensuring their professional repercussions.” Furthermore, Toto reminds us, LuPone has been a card-carrying partisan hate-monger until her recent discovery of the value of dissent. “In 2018, she launched a vile attack on a huge swath of U.S. citizens,” Toto says. “Their crime? Disagreeing with her worldview: “The Christian right in America is no different from al-Qaida. Print that, because someone needs to say it out loud!” Toto also notes that LuPone “suggested the neighbor who nearly killed Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) in 2017 had the right idea.” (Ethics Alarms included this in a list of progressives and Democrats advocating violence against Republicans and conservatives in 2017.)

Voices of the Totalitarian Left are suddenly in favor of tolerance because it senses that the nation is losing tolerance for them.