Bill's Bleeding Heart Show

Does Bill Maher think Matt Drudge is making up stories about black malice?

No. He condemns Drudge's editorial focus, not his veracity. Drudge pays undue attention to negative black behavior. Who decides what constitutes undue attention? Bill Maher says Bill Maher decides. But we already knew that.

Bill wants you to know Matt Drudge is a racist. Bill misses the point entirely. Who cares who's a racist anymore? It doesn't matter why Drudge insists on rubbing Bill's prominent proboscis in black misbehavior and violence (Maher "monitored" every disgusting post that week). Maher derides the relevance of Drudge's choices. But of what relevance is the reality of black malice?

Liberals will remind you violent crime generally remains down, and the average American still hasn't a reasonable fear of blacks as long as he stays out of their neighborhoods. So only the bad people, the Other White People, notice. It is a matter of proud indifference for Bill.  But the violence itself is the least of it; it's what that violence demonstrates: the Left's critique of race and civil rights is a thoroughgoing lie. Black, not white, Americans are failing at equality. Black America is rejecting the Western liberal tradition, to the extent it understands it.

Bill Maher thinks he's outraged by Matt Drudge's stereotyping of blacks; by his prejudice against them; by his lack of (what Bill refuses to call) Christian charity toward them and their problems. But we can see that's pure bunk.

What should fret Maher is what black violence and failure says about the myth of white racism, founding myth of the perverted Christianity that progressivism has become. Without it, and without its redemption fable--absolution by righting the ultimate wrong of white American slavery (with Barack Obama as a minor messiah)--the entire progressive edifice is threatened. As that messiah gives the tacit approval of silence to the violence while concurrently betraying every traditional (dread word!) progressive cause, it has to dawn, eventually, even on Bill, that black folk, and any elite that may come from them, want nothing whatsoever to do with his absolution. They can neither spell nor define the word. Bill is just another white chump taken in by the brothers. If only he was poor white trash he would have seen it coming.

Something John Derbyshire said in his Gawker interview  strikes me: the present anti-racist hysterics might be explained by the justified anxiety of the Left before the demographic carnage it has wrought. We all have to swim in the same waters. Or at least, insulation is expensive. But if one can't trust in that timeless American image of the noble, suffering black, if black America shoves him aside to celebrate such buffoonish monsters as, yes Bill, a Mike Tyson or Reverend Farrakhan, then what can one trust? The black-white reparations model has been adopted by all manner of political identity, culminating in the sudden domination of gay advocacy. All these other identities are invested in black Americans at least making a show of it.

When Bill snarls that Matt Drudge should look away or shut up, he is engaged in containment. Potential waves of disillusion threaten to cascade outward, leveling the theoretical architecture of the American Left. The oppression of the past explains the malice of the present, convention demands; the crime thinker wonders if the malice of the present doesn't in fact explain the oppression of the past. The Narrative wearies. The Left should be worried. They have created a model and a monster called Resentment, encouraging all to apply for a franchise.
Thee have conquered. Now what?

This presents an existential crisis for the individual. If black people really are their own worst enemy, and their neighbors' worst enemy, what's it all been about? For the faithful Bill Maher, all he's left with is a Godless world and a big lie.