‘Come On, You’re Watching CNN! Yes!’ Bill Maher Scoffs At Viewer Asking If There’s Fascist Movement In America

Comic and pundit Bill Maher scoffed at an audience member who asked “Is there really an emerging fascist movement” in the U.S., answering “Come on. You’re watching CNN! Yes, there is!”

Following Friday night’s edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, CNN’s experiment of putting Bill Maher’s weekly “Overtime” segment that follows the show on at 11:30 continued, as Maher was joined by Esther Perel, Glenn Loury, and Daniel Bessner.

Maher name-checked his partner network while jokingly disposing of the question, before agreeing with guests that the word “fascism” is overused:

MAHER: Is the future of democracy truly at stake in the U.S. as some contend? Is there really an emerging fascist movement? Well, yeah. Don’t you watch the news? Come on. You’re watching CNN! Yes, there is! No? All right, next question.

BESSNER: I would disagree about identifying it specifically as fascist even though there is a far-right authoritarian movement. I don’t think it meaningfully mirrors the fascist movements of Italy or Germany in the ’20s and the ’30s.

MAHER: No.

BESSNERL: And I don’t know it’s a particularly mobilizing thing to do. But I appreciate the tenor of the question and I agree with it.

LOURY: I mean fascism was fascism.

BESSNER: Yeah.

LOURY: We shouldn’t throw words around casually.

BESSNER: Exactly.

MAHER: That is fixed with pink (ph) democracy. People do throw that word around very casually. And there’s — and there’s never any like specific definition of it that I know of. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

PEREL: No, I think that if you’re going to go back to compare the Italy Germany, they were — it took one year for it to go from an authoritarian situation to a more fascistic situation. And you just know it when you start to experience it because society in which there is a constant polarization, no complex issues can actually hold their polarities and it becomes either or, you or me, right or wrong, black and white. That system of culture wreaks this.

MAHER: Preach sister.

Watch above via CNN and HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

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