Bill Maher went toe-to-toe with right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro.
The Real Time host didn’t mince words during a conversation with Shapiro on Friday night’s episode, fact-checking the podcaster as he attempted to claim leftists were overwhelmingly responsible for political violence, citing Tyler Robinson as evidence.
Speaking to Shapiro and author Tim Alberta on his show, Maher condemned political violence on both sides while pushing back on Shapiro’s claims that the right “hasn’t fired a bullet.”
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“Your side has fired a lot of bullets,” Maher said. “And used hammers on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and used firebombs on Governor Shapiro’s house.”
Shapiro interjected to say, “If we are not politically correct, then we understand that if there’s a shooting at a synagogue, it is very likely to be either a white supremacist or a radical Muslim. If it’s a shooting of a Republican politician, it is very likely to be trans, antifa, Marxist shooters.”
When Maher argued that nobody yet knows what the political views of the 22-year-old arrested for shooting Charlie Kirk are, Shapiro doubled down and claimed that Tyler Robinson was “of the political left.”
“It’s two days out. We don’t know s--t, Ben. They never do. The internet is undefeated in getting it wrong to begin with,” Maher replied.
Robinson’s political views are unclear at this time. He comes from a Republican family, but was himself an unaffiliated voter. While bullets found at the scene featured anti-fascist messaging, the layers of irony, memes, and cultural references required to even begin trying to understand Robinson’s motivations are numerous and disorienting.
Maher then ran through all of the theories that spread across social media in the hours following Kirk’s death: that Robinson was a registered Republican, that he was a Trump donor, and that he was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to name a few.
“We don’t know what he is,” Maher continued. “How are you so sure he’s of the left? He may have been part of that group for whom Charlie Kirk was not right-wing enough. You’re sure he’s not that?”
When Shapiro replied, “I’m not sure he’s not that,” Maher responded, “Oh? A minute ago you were sure of what he was.”
Shapiro then went on to talk for over a minute about permission structures that enable violence, while slipping in his own pet causes including references to transgender people and immigration policy.
Having let Shapiro speak uninterrupted, Maher calmly replied, “I think you are projecting your own intellectual rational world onto people who are not living in that universe.” The host’s comment was met with rapturous applause.
In the days following Kirk’s death, Shapiro has described Kirk as a “free speech martyr” and decried the “rising tide of violence on the left,” writing in his publication The Daily Wire that “it feels as though a tsunami is coming.”
“That tsunami, if left unchecked, will wash away this entire republic.”
Not mentioned by Shapiro were attacks on Democrats like Paul Pelosi, Governor Josh Shapiro, the murders of Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, or recent attacks on the CDC.
Speaking to PolitiFact, Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explained that as political violence rises, it will affect everyone, regardless of party affiliation.
“The more people justify violence from their side of the aisle, the more unhinged, aggressive people will commit violence from that side. And the more that will justify the other side in doing the same,” Kleinfeld said.
