Maher skewers wealthy celebs who preached 'we're all in it together' during COVID as Americans struggled
"Club Random" host Bill Maher called liberal celebrities "posers" for claiming "we're all in it together" while they stayed at home and had the other half of America deliver their food.
Talk show host Bill Maher blasted celebrities as being comically out of touch during the COVID-19 pandemic on Monday, even as they said they were struggling alongside everyday Americans.
On his "Club Random" podcast, Maher talked with his guest, media mogul Byron Allen, about how much they both prefer living in houses rather than even the nicest apartment buildings, where they would have to share walls with other people.
"I don't want to speak for all New Yorkers, but they definitely started to agree with us when COVID hit," Allen said, noting that many New Yorkers fled the city during the pandemic for places like Aspen or the Hamptons.
Maher said it was a perfect example of how wealthy liberal rhetoric during the pandemic did not match their actual behavior.
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"You know, that's one of my big bugaboos about COVID, and the people who attack me about COVID, is that the bulls--- of, every time I turned on the TV, it was some version of, ‘We're all in it together,’" he recalled. "No we're not, you f---ing a--holes, you f---ing posers."
Maher added that during that time period, "Half of us are getting food delivered by the other half. And you're the half that's sitting home in your pajamas talking about how much we're all in it together."
"No, you're going out to the Hamptons. I know you're putting out Instagram political messages about it, and that's awesome," he joked sarcastically.
Maher, despite being a left-leaning celebrity himself, has spoken out numerous times about how his fellow liberal celebrities simply cannot connect to the struggles of everyday people and come across as tone-deaf when they try to do so.
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He went on to argue that such celebrities are actually insulated from the issues of regular people and suggested, "If we're really all in it together, I got an idea. How about we take turns about who's working for Grubhub? You know, if we're really all in it together, maybe that should be something that has to get passed around. So, some of us are delivering some of the time instead of some of us delivering all of the time and some of us in our pajamas all the time."
One moment from the pandemic that seemed to illustrate that disconnect was when several celebrities, such as Gal Gadot, Will Ferrell, Mark Ruffalo, Pedro Pascal and Natalie Portman, sang John Lennon’s "Imagine."
While the song is widely known for imagining a utopian global "brotherhood of man" with no religion or countries, the lyrics "Imagine there's no heaven" and "Imagine no possessions" were seen as particularly tone-deaf sentiments from the wealthy celebrities, as millions of people were losing loved ones and livelihoods in a global pandemic.
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Years later, Gadot commented that, in retrospect, the video was "in poor taste."