Twenty percent of my brain is dedicated to feuds. My nemeses are not aware of our rivalry, but that doesn’t lessen my joyful bloodlust. I love to hate a rotation of megalomaniacs and creeps, flavor-of-the-month influencers and batshit personalities. There’s unrepentant scammer and NYC media darling Caroline Calloway; disgraced delusional girlboss Rachel Hollis of the Girl, Wash Your Face empire; and “Have all you complaining minorities ever considered the world is actually good based on the statistics?” evolutionary psychologist and dickhead Steven Pinker. The list goes on.
The recipients of my hatred are typically loud, white, privileged, and heavily monetized. They sell books and workshops and podcasts and the occasional multi-level marketing scheme. They take up a lot of space in the world and they use that space to say selfish, hurtful shit. I hate them because they suck, and on some level I fear becoming them. But that fear is probably, hopefully, what separates me from them.
Occasionally I meet someone brain-poisoned by the same hatred. We are united not just by our loathing, but by the shared set of values that underpin it. A kindred hater knows the minutiae of why a public figure sucks: the deleted Instagram story where they attributed a Maya Angelou quote to themselves, the $1.8k per ticket workshop for married couples they hosted shortly before announcing their own divorce, the Islamophobic rant they delivered eight years ago. Hating with another hater is a rejuvenating, stabilizing gift. I walk away saner, knowing I am not alone and that other people pay attention to this dangerous grifter, too.
One of my longest lasting objects of loathing is political comedian Bill Maher. Calling Bill Maher a political comedian is a stretch because he is not funny and not smart, but he has made a career out of shoving his tepid insights into a setup-punchline format. I was not always a Bill Maher hater (for he is always Bill Maher, not Bill or Maher or the host of HBO’s Real Time or that sad old man recording a podcast called Club Random in his furnished basement). My mom loves to remind me that as a little kid I declared I wanted to marry Bill Maher. Let’s take a break to shudder at the thought.
In defense of Child Ella, Bill Maher was one of the only public figures who opposed the Iraq War in the early aughts. He provoked Republicans with a scathing indignation that felt like a balm to many Bush Era Democrats. As a teenager I watched Real Time every week, vindicated in my fledgling liberal identity. I was also an atheist — still an anomaly in Connecticut suburbia — and I saw Religulous in theaters and on DVD. I was too young and white to pick up on his hatred of minorities, in particular Muslims, and I laughed at his misogyny because it seemed so exaggerated and goofy. I didn’t understand yet that calling women “bimbos” isn’t a clever bit.
I fell out of love with Bill Maher when I aged into one of his favorite punching bag demographics: college students. A Christian friend who lived in my dorm suggested I pay more attention to how Bill Maher paints large swaths of people with simple, dangerous stereotypes. I took a course about agency in heavily patriarchal societies that challenged my assumptions about women who wear hijabs and other head coverings, and suddenly Maher’s jokes about burqas were a lot less funny. Simply put, I did what Bill Maher claims left-wing college students are incapable of doing: I listened to people who are different from me and challenged my assumptions about the world. In the process, I realized Bill Maher is an asshole.
Ella Dawson 