It’s no secret that Real Time host Bill Maher enjoys a toke now and then. He was the cover boy for L.A. Magazine’s recent 420 issue, and brings he habit up frequently on the show.

But that mellow side of him disguises the pitbull that has his favorite targets and topics to attack. This week’s show was a cornucopia of his usual suspects, including kids with phones, the woke agenda, and why Joe Biden is floundering.

This week’s panel discussion included Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and author of Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, and Dr. Mark T. Esper, former U.S. Secretary of Defense under President Trump and author of the memoir A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times.

They used NBC’s firing of former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel as a starting point to discuss the alienation of the country and its role in the political divide.

Zakaria wondered how much McDaniel should be punished for her prior election denials, views she’s since recanted. “Stacey Abrams was an election denier about her own election,” he pointed out, and said that you can’t “de-platform 85 million Americans.”

Esper agreed, and marveled that the NBC on-air staff seemed to lead the charge against McDaniel, and wondered aloud who was in charge, the on-air hosts or corporate leadership?

The conversation then turned toward liberalism. The classic old-school liberals are being smothered by the woke agenda, Maher posited.

Zakaria agreed. “When liberals go overboard with this puritanical zeal, it produces a backlash. You can see it in the French Revolution.” The woke wave extends beyond politics into movies, which are concerned with “how many people of color are in this? Can’t we just do a great Hamlet?” Liberalism in the classic sense “is about seeing people as individuals,” he said.

The affect of wokeism on the military was raised by Maher, who asked Esper whether its over-use in the armed forces is threatening our readiness.

“It’s not as bad as the right would say, but it’s worse than the left would acknowledge,” Esper said. The focus on it is taking time away from more important functions, Esper said, and undermines morale by subdividing the units.

All agree that Biden has allowed wokeism to flourish because he doesn’t want to fight with that wing of his party.

Maher held Esper’s feet to the fire by asking him about a second potential Trump term.

Esper admitted it would be rough if Trump returned, saying loyalty would be valued over competence. Asked whom he would support, Esper said that “every day that Trump does something crazy, the door to (voting for) Biden opens a little more.”

Zakaria suggested a Biden campaign ad that used former Trump administration staff to talk about why they feel he is a danger to democracy. “Maybe they know something.”

Earlier, Maher interviewed Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business and author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

Haidt theorizes that something happened between 2010 and 2015 that changed childhood, and he points the finger at the rise of smart phones and hi-speed connections.

“The metal health of people born after 1996 collapsed,” Haidt said. “We missed the switch.”  

The decay of parental authority was partially blamed. As discipline and structure waned, it had a bad effect on children’s mental health, as there was no balance to the social media drumbeat.

Haidt offered a four-part plan that includes no smart phones before high school, no social media until age 16, no phones allowed in schools, and an emphasis on independence and free play in the real world.

In his New Rules editorial, Maher decried the standard political question of whether we were better off four years ago, since that marked the start of the pandemic. He pointed out that many bad ideas were put forth on avoiding the virus, and theories were squelched on the pandemic’s origins, the latter now coming to light as not as crazy as originally thought. He suggested that’s why we haven’t had a Covid Commission to study what went right and wrong before the next pandemic.

See the video above for the full outline.