Maher vs. Whoopi on the Black National Anthem

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BILL MAHER: Two weeks ago, I opined that it was fine to get rid of the old anthem. We just shouldn’t have two. The program The View last week devoted a lot of time to this, while somehow avoiding what I actually said. It seemed to be a lot about a need to school me on the “black national anthem” itself.

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

MAHER: Whoopi Goldberg said we need two anthems because, quote, “We’re having to reeducate people,” because nothing ever goes wrong when you start talking about “reeducation.”

AUDIENCE: (laughter and applause)

MAHER: Just ask Chairman Mao. If we have two anthems, why not three or five? Why not a woman’s anthem, a Latino anthem, a gay, trans, indigenous peoples and Asian-Pacific islander anthem?

BUCK: Welcome back to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton show.

CLAY: Good point.

BUCK: And that was Bill Maher who… Look, he’s a leftist, and if you listen to him enough (chuckles), he’s gonna upset a lot of conservatives with much of what he says. But occasionally, occasionally — and actually not even that rarely — he says something, ’cause he knows wokeness is self-destroying and corrosive and ultimately self-defeating for the left because it consumes its own.

It always well, and that’s what it will devolve into. That’s why when you mention thing is like Mao and the Cultural Revolution and you look at what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution — something that’s not taught in this country really at all in our history classes. People don’t learn about this, because of the affinity for socialism and communism that so much of academia has.

They don’t tell you the truth about this stuff. But the notion of a multiple-anthem country or of having multiple anthems in America should be so obviously absurd and yet, Clay, people think that this is the way the country should go forward. Can you imagine if a different group came forward and said, “We need to have our own anthem,” how the left would react?

I think it obviously depends on the group. But how the left would react to that. I mean, you know, it’s a little bit like you can only say as we’ve been told by the wokeness, Black Lives Matter. You say any other lives matter —

CLAY: Get fired.

BUCK: — and you are diminishing BLM and you’re diminishing black lives. So do they get…? I think it would be fascinating. He makes a good point. But do you think if someone came forward and said, “We need a Latino-American national anthem” that that would go over well? I wonder. I think probably not.

CLAY: First of all, I think Bill Maher’s been red pilled. I really do.

BUCK: Uh… Uh, Clay?

CLAY: Honestly, I do.

BUCK: A little. Clay, I gotta… A little bit red pilled, like a tiny sliver of it.

CLAY: I think that comedians should be red pill proponents because you can’t be a great comic unless you push the bounds, typically — push the bounds — of acceptable norms in society. That is where comedy thrives is on, dare we say, the penumbra of acceptability. And the censorious nature that we live in now where people say, “Oh, I’m offended by that joke!”

It’s the antithesis of everything that standing up on the stage with a mic represents. Whether you’re a black comic like the guy, Kevin Hart, who just lost of Oscars ’cause of old jokes, or whether you’re a white comic who is also getting raked over the coals. And to your point, Buck, we did this on the OutKick the Coverage radio program.

I thought it was so ridiculous when they started playing the black national anthem that rather than respond with outrage or indignation, I went after humor, and so we created our own anthem, as Bill Maher just reflected. We had an OutKick national anthem that we played which featured the black national anthem, the white national anthem, the Hispanic national anthem, the Asian national anthem, the women’s national anthem — and the gay, straight, trans, LGBT, whatever Justin Trudeau couldn’t say last week Anthem. We had all six of those and we rolled it together in a comedic fashion. Mix tape.

BUCK: There we go.

CLAY: That’s the way, to me, you ridicule it. If you get upset, the people are like, “Oh, you’ve got white fragility! You’re unable… Oh, you’re racist for even thinking of this.” No, no. The way you ridicule the idea of a national anthem and a black national anthem is by expanding it to its logical conclusion, which is Asian people deserve their anthem, Hispanic, white, everybody does.

BUCK: Yeah, this is why it’s so instructive when you have Justin Trudeau whois the perfect, the perfect liberal. I know he’s Canada but the perfect western liberal in so many capacities because for one thing he has a history of… This guy was wearing blackface at parties on a regular basis. This is crazy, right? It wasn’t a one-off.

He did it multiple times, and then beyond that, when he tries to do the LGBTQ+ thing, you can tell it’s not so much that he couldn’t even just say it or mouth the various letters. But you could tell there was a panic in his brain as he was saying that he was leaving off the Z or the G. He was leaving off a letter and, therefore, would be giving offense. And he has to know that the reason the acronym has become what it is, is because they keep adding to it, right? So wokeness is ever expanding.

CLAY: It doesn’t end.

BUCK: Yeah. Its very nature is a demand for power. It’s a demand for the transfer of power. And they’ll say it’s about equality but actually as we see, for example, even with something like the black national anthem, it’s about changing power dynamics. It’s not about equalizing power dynamics with people. They want to transfer in their minds cultural power and authority from some to others. That’s why there is a Marxist twang, if you will, at the heart of so much of wokeness.

CLAY: No doubt. And, Buck, it doesn’t end. That’s what I keep… I think you have to keep hammering that home because there’s some people out there that will say, “Okay, why do you care? This is not that big of a deal,” and I care because it really is a slippery slope. The precedent you set continues to be taken advantage of. And, by the way, Justin Trudeau and Chris Cuomo and everybody of that universe who claims that they’re feminists or whatever it is?

BUCK: Male feminists!

CLAY: Male feminists. All they’re doing is just trying to get as much attention from women as they can, and that’s one of the ways they get it, right? “Oh, I — I’m a huge feminist!” That’s their play.