New Rule: What's the Matter with Grandma? | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

And finally, New Rule, "It's okay, Boomer" is not an argument. It's actually an admission that you don't have it. Gen Z complains a lot about me making fun of them, but I don't feel too bad about it because they never engage with the idea itself. It's always just "you're old." Yeah, that's not an argument. It's a prejudice,

what

you pretend to hate. -I'm sorry-- (LAUGHTER) -(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING) (CLICK TONGUE) I'm sorry I can't look at your Queers 4 Palestine banner and pretend like you're not an idiot, but... (AUDIENCE LAUGHTER). ...just because something is progressive doesn't always make it progress.

It's about ideas, not age. And to prove my point, tonight I'd like to talk about how incredibly crazy many people my age are. -(LAUGHTER) -(AUDIENCE LAUGHING) Something curious is happening in this election. Younger voters increasingly like Trump, and those over 60, who normally lean Republican, prefer Biden this

time

, and I think I know why. If you're my age, you've seen friends and loved ones go down a Facebook rabbit hole. (CLICK TONGUE) Or be sucked into the Fox News vortex and never be the same again, transformed from a normal person into a lunatic who is hoarding seeds of survival, and... -(AUDIENCE LAUGHING, APPLAUDING) -(CLEARS THROAT, LAUGHS) ...thinks that Jewish space lasers cause forest fires and that chemtrails are a form of mind control.

There's a viral tweet that says, "Fox News and Facebook did to our parents

what

they said video games would do to us." (AUDIENCE APPLAUSES) I think the reason Biden is winning among seniors is because we want our friends back. -(AUDIENCE APPLAUSES) -Everyone... (LAUGHTER) We all have that uncle, grandfather, brother-in-law or favorite television star. -(CLICKS TONGUE)-(AUDIENCE LAUGHING) Or a movie star who... (CLEARS THROAT) ...used to be a regular Joe, but now he sends emails in all caps about... . (CLEARS THROAT). ..election conspiracies and QAnon conspiracies, and what 5G will actually be used for, and what's going on in the basement of Hillary's pizzeria, and... -(AUDIENCE LAUGHING) -(CLEARS THROAT) ...how The reptilian shadow government threatens to turn everyone gay by putting fluoride in Budweiser. -(AUDIENCE LAUGHING) -(GUESTS LAUGHING) (CLEARS THROAT) A popular political book once asked, "What's wrong with Kansas?" Today we have to ask: "What's wrong with

grandma

?" (TONGUE CLICK) -(AUDIENCE LAUGHING) -We've seen many friends disappear into this strange black hole.

Many are married to Supreme Court justices. -(AUDIENCE LAUGHING, APPLAUDING) -(GUESTS LAUGHING) (BILL MAHER CLEARS HIS THROAT) (LAUGHTER) (CLICK TONGUE) Two days after the 2020 election, Clarence Thomas' wife, Ginni, who met Clarence in the 1980s when they made porn together... -(AUDIENCE LAUGHING) -(GUESTS LAUGHING) -(BILL LAUGHING) -(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING) Uh, she sent a text message to the President of the United States' chief of staff States, saying he heard that Biden crime families and election fraud co-conspirators would be taken to barges off Guantanamo Bay to face military tribunals. And then she wrote: "I hope this is true." Yes, and I hope you get checked for lead poisoning. -(AUDIENCE APPLAUSES, LAUGH) -(GUESTS LAUGH) Then there is the American Karen... (AUDIENCE LAUGHING) ...Martha-Ann Alito, wife of Judge Samuel Alito, who has a master's degree in library science and yet has dedicated his life to waging war on neighborhood lawn signs. (AUDIENCE LAUGHING) Martha-Ann rants about getting back at the media, not

real

izing that now nuts like her are the media. -(AUDIENCE APPLAUSES) -A re-- A recent study found that just 2,100 people spread 80 percent of the fake news on Twitter during the last election, and most of them were older white Republican women.

We've met the Russian Trollbot Army and it's your Aunt Bonnie. -(AUDIENCE LAUGHING, APPLAUDING) -(LAUGHTER) That's what it is. Yentas who post all day, and it's always a retweet, and it's always wrong. They see lies on television and believe them because it's television, and then they post them to their friends who believe them because it's Facebook. (AUDIENCE LAUGHING) And it's not just Facebook, but also X, formerly known as Twitter, and Fox News, formerly known as News. (AUDIENCE LAUGHING, APPLAUDING) A study once found that using the Fox News website as a news source made you less informed than not watching any news at all. (AUDIENCE LAUGHING) It's the Ozempic of knowing things. -(AUDIENCE LAUGHING, APPLAUDING) -(LAUGHTER) And it's still not as bad as the "the news finds me" people.

Yes. (LAUGHTER) That's the growing cohort of Americans who believe that if a story is big enough, it will hit their social media feeds. Yes, these are people who trust their Facebook friends to take care of Hannity for them. (AUDIENCE LAUGHING, APPLAUDING) But here's the thing. (CLICK ON TONGUE) With kids, when they get lost in the madness of social media, we can, and increasingly, schools and districts are doing this, by taking away their phones, at least for part of the day. But you can't take the phone away from a 70-year-old person. You can simply make the text smaller. -(AUDIENCE LAUGHING, APPLAUDING) -(GUESTS LAUGHING) BILL: So...

Then we have to find out why so many older people are so susceptible to fake news. Now, part of this is that, unlike kids, they didn't grow up with shitty media. Corporate-funded, narrative-driven, and completely partisan. So when that happened, they had no immunity. Boomers. We grew up with old school Time magazine and Walter Cronkite. The closest thing to fake news back then was pretending that Liberace was looking for a woman. -(AUDIENCE LAUGHING, APPLAUDING) -(LAUGHTER, CLEARS THROAT) (GUESTS LAUGHTER) The boom generation never developed the antibodies for clickbait. One day they turned on the television and Lawrence Welk was gone.

And in his place was a guy named Lou Dobbs who told you that the reason you had a good weekend was Donald Trump. Have a great weekend. The president makes this possible for all of us. (AUDIENCE LAUGHING) How does this happen? (CLEARS THROAT) Well, part of it, the left has to appropriate. The presence of an aggressively anti-common sense agenda on the far left is a powerful magnet that draws people to the right. But also, older people are in a bad mood. Which fits very well with the menu of hate prepared on Fox and Facebook. And there is another reason.

Because this is America, where we abandon our elderly in nursing homes. Because leaving them in the forest is illegal. -(AUDIENCE LAUGHING, APPLAUDING) -(CLEARS THROAT) So we can't be too surprised when they turn to the Fox News family as a replacement for their own. We warehouse them in homes, steal their medications, target them with phone and Internet scams, and force them to work past retirement age. (AUDIENCE LAUGHING, APPLAUDING) We treat older people like children and children like wise men. No nation disrespects older people like the United States does. It makes them feel invisible, barely tolerated, and underappreciated for the wisdom they can offer.

And perhaps that's what leads many to hate anything that comes from younger people who haven't been particularly kind to them. Perhaps the generation gap cannot be bridged, but that would be a good starting point.