The Left's War on Common Sense, and Why It's Been Waging It for Decades, By Charles Taylor (Florida)

In a November 16, 2025, interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, Bill Maher, long the liberal contrarian who once dismissed conservative alarms as hysteria, finally uttered the words many on the Right have been screaming for years: The modern Left isn't just misguided; it's "aggressively anti-common sense." Promoting his new book amid the post-2024 wreckage of Democratic fortunes, Maher didn't mince words. Today's progressives, he argued, are hell-bent on "reinventing everything," from language to biology to borders, while ignoring the tangible crises that keep voters up at night. It's a damning admission from a man who's spent decades in Hollywood's blue bubble, and it validates what conservatives have long observed: The Left's ideological fever dream isn't a recent drift; it's a chronic condition, manifesting in absurdities that range from the comical to the catastrophic.

Maher's critique lands with extra force because he's no Right-wing plant. He's lambasted Trump, election denialism, and GOP immigration rhetoric as tactical blunders that alienate moderates. But where he sees the Right's sins as fixable, rooted in anger and poor messaging, he diagnoses the Left's malaise as existential: a revolutionary impulse that prioritises cultural upheaval over practical governance. "Democrats have long positioned themselves as the adults in the room," Maher noted, but now they're the ones demanding we debate whether men can lactate or borders are "white supremacist constructs." This isn't evolution; it's devolution into a party that treats common sense like a hate crime.

The Socialist Surge: Exhibit A in Blue Cities

Maher zeroed in on the fresh electoral evidence: the November 2025 victories of self-avowed democratic socialists Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Katie Wilson in Seattle. Mamdani, a 34-year-old Ugandan-born assemblyman and DSA darling, clinched the NYC mayoralty with a nine-point edge over Andrew Cuomo's comeback bid, campaigning on rent freezes, police defunding, and "hope over tyranny." Wilson, a 43-year-old transit activist and first-time candidate, ousted incumbent Bruce Harrell by a razor-thin 50.2%-49.5% margin, railing against "big tech money" and pushing for taxes on the rich to fund housing and renter protections. Maher dubbed Wilson "Mamdani West," warning that such "revolutionary" wins in deep-blue enclaves could boomerang nationally, handing Republicans more governorships and congressional seats.

He's right, and history backs him. These aren't fringe upsets; they're the new normal in progressive strongholds, where primaries reward radicalism over results. Remember Chicago's Brandon Johnson in 2023, who promised to slash police budgets amid skyrocketing crime? Or San Francisco's London Breed, ousted in 2024 after years of "compassionate" policies that turned the streets into open-air drug markets? The pattern is clear: Elect socialists on vibes and virtue-signalling, then watch as potholes widen, taxes spike, and crime surges. Common sense? That's for the rubes in flyover country.

A Catalogue of Anti-Common Sense: From Woke Orthodoxy to Policy Madness

If Maher's epiphany feels tardy, it's because the Left's assault on reality has been building for decades, but a crescendo from the 1960s counterculture through today's campus cultism. Here's a non-exhaustive ledger of the lunacy, where ideology trumps evidence every time:

Biology & Gender Sex is a spectrum; men can menstruate; "chestfeeding" over "breastfeeding." Chromosomes don't care about feelings, XX or XY sets the binary from conception. Disorders like DSDs (0.018% of births) are anomalies, not a new paradigm.

Crime & Policing"Defund the police"; cashless bail; treat addicts as victims, not violators.Post-George Floyd spikes in urban homicide (up 30% in 2020) reversed only with tougher enforcement. Soft-on-crime DAs like Philly's Larry Krasner oversaw 2023 murder records.

Immigration & BordersOpen borders as "humanitarian"; walls are racist; migrants boost the economy. Unvetted influxes strain resources, NYC spent $4B+ on 200K migrants since 2022. Wage suppression for low-skill workers? Studies show yes, per Harvard economist George Borjas.

Education & DEIEquity over equality; "whiteness" as oppression; suppress dissenting views.DEI hires prioritise identity over merit, correlating with corporate scandals (e.g., Boeing's 737 MAX woes amid diversity pushes). Free speech on campuses? Plummeting, per FIRE's 2024 rankings.

Energy & EnvironmentBan fossil fuels overnight; EVs for all; nuclear is "unsafe."Germany's Energiewende jacked up energy prices 50% while relying on Russian gas. U.S. EV mandates ignore grid overload, California's blackouts persist despite "green" virtue.

EconomicsPrice controls, rent freezes, "tax the rich" as panacea. Venezuela's socialist experiment: Hyperinflation hit 1M% in 2018. NYC's 2019 rent laws? Supply cratered, prices rose 20% long-term.

This isn't hyperbole; it's empirical. The Left's "reinvention" fetish, rewriting pronouns one day, upending supply chains the next, stems from a hubris that views ordinary Americans as obstacles to utopia. As Maher put it, they've abandoned "biology, borders, policing, merit, free speech, [and] objective truth." When Harvard's 2024 study found 70% of young Democrats prioritise "systemic change" over economic stability, you see the rot: Revolution feels good until the lights flicker out.

The Maher Effect: Permission for the Politically Homeless

What makes Maher's monologue a milestone isn't novelty, Rush Limbaugh was riffing on this in the '90s, but validation from a blue-check liberal. X lit up with shares from disillusioned Dems, one posting: "Finally, someone says it — Maher's words resonate with those of us feeling homeless in our own party." Another: "The Left's anti-common sense is why we lost everything in '24." It's permission structure for the squishy centre: You don't have to be a MAGA hat-wearer to see that socialism in Seattle won't fix Seattle's streets.

Conservatives should heed the article's advice. The Left's crazy? It's structural, a worldview that mistakes compassion for competence and abstraction for action. As Mamdani and Wilson gear up to govern, watch the common-sense deficit explode: More taxes, fewer cops, endless excuses. Bill Maher just gave voice to the exhaustion. Now, the question is whether enough Democrats will listen, or if the party's ideological bunkers will hold till the next electoral implosion. Either way, reality has a 100% replication rate.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/11/bill_maher_the_left_has_gone_anti_common_sense.html