Unearthed Video reveals Bill Maher and Milo Yiannopoulos’s Common Ground
A recently surfaced video shows that Bill Maher and Milo Yiannopoulos have a lot more in common than mocking people’s beliefs and then claiming they’re “just kidding!! Not really!!” In the video, Maher defends relationships between adults and 13-year-olds, the exact same thing that wrecked Yiannopoulos’s career over the long weekend.
if bill maher thinks sunlight is the best disinfectant then here's him saying the same shit as milo, that it's ok for adults to fuck kids pic.twitter.com/tqPAzbGY3J
— warrior cop (@wyatt_privilege) February 22, 2017
Surfaced today by Twitter user @wyatt_privilege, the clip is from the March 20, 1998 episode of Maher’s show prior to Real Time, Politically incorrect, which started on Comedy Central in 1993 before moving to ABC. On the episode, Maher and his panel are discussing Mary Kay Letourneau, a 35-year-old Seattle teacher arrested for having sex (and two children) with her 13-year-old student.
Calling their relationship “unconventional,” Maher says the pair is “having a family, and they’re keeping the mother in jail because they won’t conform to what society feels should be the perfect American family.”
When another guest, California Republican politician Celeste Greig says it’s “disgusting” that a grown woman would “rape” a student so much younger, Maher throws his hands in the air and replies, “Rape? How do you know . . . how can a woman rape a man?”
Musician and author Henry Rollins, also on the panel, replies, “I think an older woman can manipulate a young kid, and I don’t think it’s healthy.”
On the controversial video which has destroyed his career, Yiannopoulos had defended sexual relationships between adults and teenagers of 13 or older. “Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13 years old who is sexually mature,” he said. “Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty.” The tape, widely characterized as a defense of pedophilia, was released following a booking on Real Time with Bill Maher this past Friday.
In days following, YiannopouloS was disinvited from speaking at the annual conservative conference CPAC, lost the support of his core followers on places like 4chan’s “politically incorrect” board /pol, and had his famous quarter-million-dollar book contract cancelled (one wonders what portion of the advance he’ll be returning).
Maher has a history of booking young, attractive people with extreme political views on his programs. In a New York Times interview Wednesday, he dismissed Yiannopoulos as an “emotionally needy Ann Coulter wannabe.” This is likely exactly what Maher was hoping for when he booked Yiannopoulos. He was instrumental in popularizing and giving a platform not just to Ann Coulter, who appeared on both the first season of Real Time and the final season of Politically Incorrect four times, but also people like Michelle Bachmann; the 1998 episode where he defends Letourneau also featured former MTV VJ Kennedy, an outspoken Republican.
During the Yiannopoulos interview, Maher seems taken, telling him he reminds him of “a young, gay, alive, Christopher Hitchens,” and tries to give him advice about how to manage himself on camera, repeatedly encouraging him to settle down and pick his targets more precisely. The two especially bond about the role of comedy in standing up to “authoritarians”; Yiannopoulos is banned from Twitter, and Maher briefly had his show cancelled 15 years ago.
In that Times interview, Maher essentially took credit for Yiannopoulos’ fall, saying that even though many people were outraged that he’d given him a platform on his show, he’d actually exposed him: “sunlight is the best disinfectant. You’re welcome.”
