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Bill Maher’s attack on schools, declining culture correlates with Democrat’s hold on ‘indoctrination’, critics say

January 24, 2023 | | Print Article

The common ground found over protecting kids from progressive ideologues has not only revealed strange bedfellows like comedian Bill Maher but also just how much the left owns “certain areas of our culture.”

(Video: Fox News)

During Monday’s episode of “The Five,” the hosts examined Maher’s latest “dose of reality” on the matter of school indoctrination. The comedian, who made certain to blame systems over individual teachers, took a swing at Democratic control of education.

Jeanine Pirro offered “kudos” to Maher for taking on the topic and lamented the lack of attention given to teaching respect for authority, but co-host Greg Gutfeld steered toward the political root cause.

“I think the point he’s making is that certain political parties own certain areas of our culture,” he said. “And right now you’re looking at one that is falling apart and why is that? It’s because they are staking out the most irrational positions on stuff like trans surgery.”

As previously covered, Maher had said, “We live in a prison yard in this country, which is everything is tribal. And like anything that has to do with schools or education is something really the Democrats have to answer for because they control it. I mean, if you look at the Democratic Convention, it’s like three-quarters of them are teachers.”

“My sister’s a teacher. I’m a big defender of teachers, but what’s going on in the schools is outrageous, and somebody needs to answer for it,” he added, before later asking the question, “Why does a four-year-old come in, instead of teaching them the colors, you’re telling them, ‘Pick your pronoun?’ Where on earth did that come from? And who told us it was going to be imposed on children?”

“You don’t have to take that position. Right?” Gutfeld said of the ideological left. “The most reasonable position for gender affirmation surgery is that you shouldn’t perform it or any irreversible operation on a healthy child who has no firmly developed brain structure yet.”

“That our government actually believes that you’re a transphobe if you want to get between a child, a healthy child, and an activist with a scalpel, we got problems,” he noted before asserting Maher “is getting at the fact…for a progressive like him to exist, to survive and to thrive, there has to be standards. There has to be biology. There has to be math. Because if you take that all way, then there is no way to be able to tell if you’re making any progress at all.”

“So instead, you have a government that is actually saying no, kids should have the right to have their genitals mutilated before they even have a firmly structured brain to understand it. That’s crazy,” Gutfeld concluded for the moment.

Later in the segment, his positions drew the ire of liberal co-host Jessica Tarlov who strayed from the topic that evolved to include Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R-Fla.) effort to weed out Marxist-based teachings like critical race theory and queer theory as she irately questioned Gutfeld, “You don’t think that black trans people exist or black queer people exist?”

“That’s a straw man. Or a straw trans, excuse me,” he joked before drawing more ire from Tarlov who fumed, “Don’t do that. This is serious.”

Gutfeld ceded no ground as he countered back, “No, I’m actually being serious. Just because people do not want that stuff, because it’s age-inappropriate, does not make them transphobic because you’re going there.”

Kevin Haggerty
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