Comedian and podcast host Bill Maher lauded Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s crusade against cancel culture during a recent podcast episode.
Maher made the comments in Monday’s episode of his “Club Random” podcast, which featured Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington as a guest.
“If we’re talking about Elon Musk and Twitter, I happen to like him, I don’t care who fucking knows,” Maher said.
“Well, I like him too,” Huffington responded.
“Yeah, I’m sure. And there’s two things we disagree on. Going to Mars I think is incredibly stupid and it’s been great comedy fodder for me, and also his idea that we need to increase the population, seems just completely insane,” Maher added. “But on Twitter, I think he is doing a very selfless thing. I think he is doing basically kind of what Edward Snowden did. Because he certainly didn’t need this headache.”
Musk acquired Twitter in Oct. 2022 for around $44 billion and subsequently began releasing internal documents, known as the “Twitter Files,” that revealed the platform’s censorship operations.
“If you’re going to kill wokeness — I’m talking about the side of woke-ness that is obnoxious and probably could take down the entire Democratic Party — if you’re going to drive a stake through that, the shit we were just talking about, the heart of it is Twitter. That is the place where all the canceling and all the hating is rampant,” he continued. (RELATED: Elon Musk Crashed A Meeting Of Self-Obsesses Liberal Journalists And Straight Up Told Them They’re ‘Not Special’)
“Look at what he did! He removed former Twitter journalists who disagreed with him,” Huffington shot back.
Musk briefly suspended eight journalists’ Twitter accounts in December, accusing them of live-sharing his location and posting what he described as “basically assassination coordinates.” Musk then publicly feuded with journalist Bari Weiss, one of the journalists who published the “Twitter Files,” after she criticized Musk’s decision.
“Twitter needed to be taken over,” Maher responded. “It wasn’t going to go away and it’s a thing that people use for hate.”
Maher said Twitter was a poor place for discourse but that Musk was doing what he could to turn things around and restore free speech.
“But if the whole point is free speech and then you basically punish Bari Weiss because she disagreed with him,” Huffington said. “It’s not like esoteric little point I’m making. It’s fundamental to what he claimed to be doing on Twitter.”
“Yeah, I mean, absolutely he has stumbled along the way and sometimes been his own worst enemy. But I don’t feel like it ever comes out of a place of terrible maliciousness. He’s an impulsive genius kind of guy,” Maher said.
