Maher's whole point about Democrats becoming hyper-regulatory to the point of being counter-productive, with his story about what he had to do to install a solar panel - I see that all the time, like here:

As the tweeter notes, it's even a theme of a popular TV show.

Sarandon trolls, NYPost trolls back, liberals get more bad rep:

The danger arises from illiberalism on the left and the right. Both sides are chipping away at the foundations of the American Republic; each side seems oblivious to its own defects.

from What’s Happening on the Left Is No Excuse for What’s Happening on the Right Op-ed @ NYTimes.com, Jan. 20, 2022, by Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner (Mr. Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.)

This is the same place Maher is coming from. He made his bones making fun of conservatives and still does that a lot. He's a liberal by the old standards. His harangue in the video is: Why did those standards change on him? Why did so many liberals become illiberal "progressives"? And the Rauch & Weiner op-ed makes clear that the tit-for-tat trolling by the illiberal right of the illiberal left, and vice-versa, is what is feeding the divisiveness that everyone is noticing unless they are blind.

Ironically it is common for many to see Maher as an illiberal complainer. No he's not. He's a liberal. Don't blame the messenger, look at yourself.

Going to be tough to prove this meme wrong:

Reality check version by Nate Silver and David Shor, not getting personal about it but just talking about what they see:

The Editorial Board of the internationally prestigious (and yes, elite,) Financial Times have heard tell of Maher's rant, think it has merit, and have decided to give their opinion on it (it basically says it's time for Joe to have some Sister Souljah moments, to stop "ducking" those, or else).Copied for fair use purposes to share with my fellow news junkies on Dagblog as a comment on my blog tracking the topic. My underlining added.

Joe Biden must confront the left’s cultural over-reach

Many liberal Americans also worry about the excesses of progressive activism

THE EDITORIAL BOARD @ The Financial Times, Feb. 10

Last month, Bill Maher, a pot-smoking bachelor and no one’s idea of a traditionalist, used his HBO talk show to attack America’s political left. His complaints ranged from gender-neutral toys to slack enforcement of the laws against shoplifting in San Francisco. He drew a distinction between a fringe of cultural radicals and a liberal mass who “refuse to call them out for it”.

Parts of his screed were sensationalist. In a federal system of 350mn people, there will always be local oddities in policy. But it is foolish to ignore the fact that lots of even non-conservative Americans (his cheering audience included) agree with him. Or that his delineation of the left into two groups is astute.

The number of Democrats who really want a cultural revolution is small. Those who lack the stomach to confront the zealots are legion. They have spent much of the past two years, for instance, pretending that Defund the Police means something else.

This ducking of the issue has a price. There are lots of reasons why President Joe Biden has low approval ratings. He has been a disappointment in the fight against the pandemic. In his social spending bill, he has assumed that policies that poll well individually remain popular when combined in great number. Part of the mix of problems, though, is cultural. Some voters worry that the 79-year-old is uncomprehending and therefore indulgent of a generation of progressive activists.

Republicans attribute their victory of the Virginia governorship in November at least in part to a backlash from cultural moderates. Among the first executive acts of Glenn Youngkin, who took possession of the office last month, has been to purge school curricula of “divisive concepts, including critical race theory”. Vague, yes. Cynical, even. But if his message resonates in solidly blue Virginia, Biden must consider the mood in Arizona and Georgia, among other states he took from the Republicans in 2020.

A president cannot and should not micromanage local policing and schooling, much less the private decisions of “woke” business. What he can do is state his own liberal-but-not-radical position in the cultural struggles of the day, as did former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama at various times.

Maher is not the only American who subscribes to liberalism in its old sense while balking at group rights, equivocation over crime (many of whose victims are poor minorities) and the minefield of modern speech. It is not as though Biden need turn into J Edgar Hoover to win these voters over. And if and when they are reassured, the Republicans’ own capacity for cultural over-reach, perhaps in the form of judicial rulings on abortion and other issues this year, will stand out.

At the moment, Biden is relying on his bona fides to get him through. He has spent much of his career at the conservative end of his party. He is a Catholic who came of age before the Permissive Society of the 1960s. If anything, the worry upon his third bid for the White House was that the author of hardline criminal justice laws was too draconian and old-fashioned for modern America. Perhaps to compensate for that past, however, he has been nervous to shout down the strident voices to his left. He is caught between strict liberals and the kind of progressives for whom liberalism is a polite cover for all kinds of structural inequities. Refusing to pick a side is a good way to maintain the uneasy peace within the Democratic party. Unfortunately, it is also a good way of arousing the mistrust of large parts of the country.

New York Times so woke it's bleeding:

nuance on one thing gone viral:

tho I betcha Bill Maher would be all for giving em crack pipes if it would make them stay off the streets stealing stuff

Preaching to her choir AND A.O.C. retweeted it:

Josh Hawley tries to brand Biden with her via mainstream Axios. She takes the bait, doesn't defend Biden, of course. She digs in that her tribe is being murdered,it's them against the whole racist U.S.A. Not exactly a team member. And AOC applauds. Biden admin.: crickets, no sister souljah. Jim Clyburn's office probably silently swearing, trying to figure out how to gag her.

meanwhile what the evil supposedly "DINO" Joe Manchin is worrying about

one reply of many

which sounds like most Americans right now, Ilhan Omar & Cori Bush or Joe Manchin?

Dems are going to go down in the Nov. elections without more Sister Souljah moments.

It's no longer about Trump for the Dem vote, he's history for 2022, especially now that he's turned his back on DeSantis types. But people who could vote for DeSantis types or Manchin types, they may very well if Dems keep up with not decrying the Woke shit. I've got a real strong inkling that lots of these kind of people are still very mad about the 2020 riots, much more than they care about what happens about Jan. 6, especially since so many of the Jan. 6 participants are being prosecuted. but the ring leaders, you say. Well if you're not into ideology but practicality, people have their own agency and nobody is forcing them to riot. If you're not into arresting "ringleaders" who excuse looting and burning, then why are you going after some and not others? yeah, yeah, they know,  heard it before, democracy is under threat when they attack congress blah blah blah but not when they burn police stations and attack federal courthouses...national politicians represent the people but bodega owners don't blah blah blah

this >>>>

Another well-known liberal willing to say straight out that he's increasingly repulsed by both parties and no longer has a political home

Opinion: I reject both parties’ ideas of Americanism. And I’m not the only one.

By Matt Bai @ WashingtonPost.com Contributing columnist, Yesterday at 3:45 p.m. EST

This is a FULL COPY OF ARTICLE by paid subscriber FOR FAIR USE

For more than two decades, I’ve tried to make sense of political currents in both parties, often to the consternation of readers on both sides. I’ve been called a corporatist and Republican apologist; more often, I’m called an elitist who pumps out Democratic talking points.

In all that time, I have not felt as utterly repulsed from the mainstream of both parties as I do right now. And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone.

Like most kids who grew up politically engaged in the Northeast, I started political life as a registered Democrat, casting my first presidential vote for Michael Dukakis. In my mid-20s, while a city desk reporter at the Boston Globe, I changed my registration to independent, and I’ve never gone back.

For many years, when I told curious politicos or readers that I was an independent, they would nod knowingly, as if we both understood this was a necessity of the job — a veneer covering my obviously leftist sensibilities.

In fact, I never thought party registration had anything to do with my credibility as a reporter. I chose to be an independent because, temperamentally and intellectually, that’s how I’m wired.

I wasn’t comfortable with the increasing tribalism of party politics. And once you’ve covered cops, courts and housing projects in cities such as Boston and New York, it’s hard to maintain a belief that government has all the answers.

Through six presidential campaigns and counting, I have found much to disdain in both parties but also plenty to admire. I like politicians generally, and I’ve written positively about both Democrats and Republicans — Barack Obama, Mark R. Warner, Chris Christie, John Kasich — who had the courage to rethink old orthodoxies.

I have never bought into the idea that journalists shouldn’t vote — that refraining from the exercise of citizenship somehow made us any less biased. I’ve voted Democratic in most elections, if not always enthusiastically, and I’ve cast ballots for Republicans and third-party candidates, too.

All of which is to say that, like a growing number of Americans who eschew party affiliations, I leaned in one direction more often than not, but I wasn’t a loyalist.

Lately, however, I find myself feeling not so much ambivalent about the parties as alienated. I’m confronted with two extreme interpretations of what it means to be American, and I emphatically reject them both.

It seems self-evident that the Republican Party — more a celebrity fan club than a political organization at this point — would, if left to its own devices, destroy the foundation of the republic. I never thought I’d write those words about any U.S. political party, but here we are.

It’s not just that Donald Trump and his imitators would blow up the integrity of our elections, or that they have expressly countenanced a violent insurrection against the federal government, or that they basically admit to having no governing agenda beyond the reclamation of some mythical White heritage.

It’s also that the Trumpist GOP advances the notion, in all kinds of ways, that citizenship alone doesn’t mean you belong here — that your race or ethnicity, the language that you speak, or the identity you choose can somehow make you less American than your neighbor.

We’ve seen this interpretation of Americanism before — in segregated schools and diners, in the internment of Japanese Americans, in populist disdain for Catholics and Jews. No patriotic American should entertain it, and no politician with an ounce of integrity would excuse it.

You might think, given this Republican calamity, that any political alternative would be sufficient. And, yes, a party that doesn’t seek to limit ballot access and install an autocrat is definitely a step up.

But that doesn’t mean a lot of us who consider ourselves liberal feel kinship with today’s Democratic Party — or that we’d even be welcome if we did.

Rather than focus on traditional American ideals of citizenship over race or origin, the left is in thrall to its own misguided cultural revolution (yes, I use the term deliberately), embracing a vision of the United States that lays waste to the 20th-century liberalism of its greatest icons.

I’ve always liked and respected President Biden, and in most ways he has governed well. His $1.2 trillion infrastructure package was a major achievement. His efforts to counter the pandemic have been steady. He seems poised to make a historic addition to the Supreme Court.

For all of his successes, though, there’s a fire raging in his party that Biden hasn’t even tried to control — and probably couldn’t extinguish if he did. For me (and probably a lot of suburbanites voting this fall), this is more than a backdrop to his presidency. It’s a dealbreaker.

In their zeal to beat back Trumpism, the loudest Democratic groups have transformed into its Bizarro World imitators. Tossing aside ideals of equal opportunity and free expression, the new leftists obsess on identity as much as their adversaries do — but instead of trying to restore some obsolete notion of a White-dominated society, they seek vengeance under the guise of virtue.

One of the bibles of this movement is a book called “How to Be an Antiracist,” in which Ibram X. Kendi declares: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

This is not — as the celebrated author claims — an expression of support for Lyndon B. Johnson-style affirmative action, which still makes sense to me. It is a case for the kind of social upheaval that occurred when foreign empires relinquished their colonies. It does not end well.

Liberals used to believe in civil debate about such ideas. But now, the arbiters of language are constantly issuing Soviet-style edicts about which terms are acceptable and which aren’t (“woke” was okay, now it’s not) — a tactic used for controlling the debate and delegitimizing critics.

We can disagree about whether this radical uprising is necessary or politically self-destructive. But it’s clearly not in keeping with the principles that are supposed to unite the country.

I was taught — and still believe — that in the United States, we are bound not by common origin, language or culture but by a series of laws and values that make us who we are.

As long as you swear allegiance to those laws and values — racial equality, free speech, unfettered worship — then you’re no more or less American than anyone else, and no less deserving of respect, protection and opportunity.

That we’ve failed to honor that promise over the life of the country, and are failing still, doesn’t mean you throw up your hands and abandon the project. It means you rededicate yourself to the ideal of true equality, rather than reducing individuals to a box on a census form.

This is the ideology that both parties used to call liberalism. There is no longer room for it in today’s stark political dichotomy.

In part, it’s a testimony to the damage that one shameless and unprincipled man managed to wreak on our politics. Trump always had a talent for bringing out the worst in everyone; more than a year after leaving office, he remains the decaying star by which everyone else in our political solar system must orient themselves.

But it’s also the result of an antiquated primary system — at the presidential level and below — that plays to an ever-winnowing group of fervent believers in both parties.

The more people grow disgusted with extremist party politics, the more only those extremists are heard and the more power they exert on anyone who wants to run for higher office.

This is about the point where some (most likely some in my own business) will scream: “Both sidesism!” That’s the now-cliche argument that any criticism of Democrats whatsoever must be some kind of journalistic reflex to equate the parties, when clearly one is worse than the other.

One is worse than the other. But that doesn’t mean we have to feel jazzed about supporting a party that would grade our worthiness as people on a sliding scale of identity. It doesn’t change the fact that the broad center of the American electorate — traditional conservatives and liberals both — no longer has a political home.

So where do we go?

For years, I’ve predicted the eventual triumph of an independent president, outside the two-party system. That candidate hasn’t emerged, but the lane for a credible independent has never been wider.

There’s also the probability that some reformist Democratic governor or political novice is looking at the political landscape and thinking that, if you could unify that liberal constituency inside the party, you might just be able to commandeer it.

I’ve never been very good at predicting the path ahead. What I do know is that politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum — and, one way or another, a force will arise to fill the space at the eye of our destructive political storm.

Until then, you can call me a dissenter.

yet another liberal saying the woke don't stand for his values

Denial is a river in Egypt:

My take: AOC has it exactly backwards. Her and the other "The Squad" types are the reason the Democrats lost House seats in the 2020 election and the only reason Democrats have 50 Democratic senators instead of 48 is that Jim Clyburn made them sit down and shut up about "socialism" and "defund" until the special election in Georgia was over

Andrew Yang:

Elon Musk today:

Elon Musk isn’t imagining things

This post has been very platform-centric because platforms are a convenient index.

But the ideological movement — not an overthrow of the party establishment by leftists, but the establishment leaders themselves taking on new ideas — is clearly visible in other forms. In June of 2016, Dylan Matthews wrote for Vox that “President Obama’s huge reversal on Social Security is a big win for liberals.” In July of that year, Victoria Massie wrote “Hillary Clinton said ‘systemic racism’ in tonight's speech. That's major.” On May 27 of 2020, David Roberts described a new consensus approach to climate policy on the left, and on May 28 he published a piece arguing that Joe Biden should embrace this consensus even though Biden “just won without them.”

You can see that both of those articles have July 2020 updates at the top noting that Biden had basically done what Roberts recommended and adopted the new progressive consensus. Pivoting left after winning a primary is a little odd, but it’s what Biden did, and progressives acknowledged it at the time.

There’s lots of room for debate about whether this was a good idea. But the people who yelled at Elon Musk that he was imagining this leftward transformation are being silly. The fact that DW-NOMINATE scores don’t pick up on it is a limitation of that metric — not to say that it’s wrong, but just that analysis of roll call votes only tells you so much.

Among Democrats, self-identified liberals started to outnumber self-identified moderates only in Obama’s second term. And at around that same time, mainstream Democrats started to embrace ideas that they would previously have shied away from.

That’s not a commentary on the wisdom of the ideas or of adopting them, but the shift pretty clearly happened. It’s very hard to reason clearly about the world if you don’t start by acknowledging the reality.

the ending of

Democrats have changed a lot since 2012

Moving left on economics — but also on climate, race, and a bunch of other things

by Matthew Yglesias and Milan Singh @ Slow Boring, 11 hr ago

Elon Musk this afternoon:

edit to add, FWIW, there's currently mass quantities of derision about the above tweet trending on Twitter under "Poor Elon"

Andrew Yang interacting with orphans in the middle:

dupe on purpose:

Here to help NOT.

edit to add another example

Fox quotes Bill Maher saying GOP control will be a bad thing. (This is one benefit of doing Sister Souljah moments - they cannot brand him as a dumb 'libtard', but rather feel it important to broadcast his message that 'the big lie' is a very bad thing)

Third Way agrees:

[....] As of this writing, the host of YouTube’s The Rubin Report has 1.3 million Twitter followers and 1.79 million YouTube subscribers, who have helped to make him one of the most notable influencers on the contemporary American Right. But amid a field of frauds, clones, and wannabes, Rubin’s path to political celebrity has been among the strangest. Once a gay comedian from New York, he became a dissatisfied liberal LA interviewer, and has now decamped to Miami in his latest incarnation as pro-Trump, Newsmax-commentating, party-line Republican. There, he rallies with Ron DeSantis, dines with Donald Trump Jr., and guests at Peter Thiel’s fundraisers.

Rubin’s peculiar political trajectory has made him the go-to example of a modern liberal “mugged by reality” and driven from the moderate Left by progressive intolerance and irrationality. This conversion narrative has been politically compelling and personally lucrative. His most watched video—PragerU’s “Why I Left The Left”—currently has over 14 million views: [....]

from

Doh

Dupe on purpose because he says the same thing, that his party moved away from him

Another liberal mugged by crime. Tweeted by Activist. Old School Lib, party moved, now Moderate D. Assoc Broker w BHS, write AFineBlog, Love NYC!

And I presume, by local 'woke' politicians that call themselves Democrats?

Bill no doubt senses young elite liberals don't like him and his anti-wokeness, and he'd be right.