On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that younger people “have been indoctrinated” to be needlessly anxious about the coronavirus, which has contributed to depression among that demographic.
Maher said, “I saw the videos of people erupting in cheers that we don’t have to wear a mask on the plane anymore. Now, there’s also, you hear from the people will die crowd. And they’re right, people will die. People will always die. I’m against people dying, but they’re always going to die. And you actually can’t stop it and masks, really, we’re finding out, are a particularly ineffective way of stopping it. I just wish it didn’t have to be political. Because I see a lot of people now on the news saying, I’m still going to wear it. It just becomes an amulet and a symbol of your party and it should just be about the science.”
He later added that when he was out last week, “[W]hat was really sad…the only people wearing masks were like 20. That’s who is wearing the masks, the people least likely to die from it. I feel like they have been indoctrinated in a way that –. … When I saw the kids with the masks all I could think of is anxiety. And then, right on cue, I’m reading…about why we have [these] levels of anxiety among teenagers that [are] just off the charts. Now, — this is what I read — 44% of high school students said they felt sad or hopeless. Now, little perspective, all my year 17, I was sad and hopeless. Because I got dumped. And when you’re a kid, you don’t see anything coming and everything is the worst thing that could ever — so, some of that is that. When you’re a teenager, you’re going to be sad and hopeless all the time. But it also said a 40% increase in such feelings in the last ten years. Also, I thought interesting, they were looking for the reasons why the kids — the CDC is looking into this, 29% lost jobs — the parents lost jobs in the pandemic. So, we haven’t tallied up all those kind[s] of negatives that went into it.”
Maher further stated that telling children they were endangering their elderly relatives “bothers me because it’s fake. Now, I’m not saying there aren’t some people who live with their grandmas, but this is a country unlike most countries in the world that does not invite the elderly into our own homes. We put them — how many of you young people who were so worried about giving it to grandma live with your grandma? Very few.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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