Bill Maher ridicules liberals’ 'Lake America' outrage with jab at left-wing language police
Bill Maher has a globe problem. Again.
During Friday's opening monologue of HBO's "Real Time," the comedian lamented what he described as the fifth time in recent memory he would need to replace his classroom sphere, this time because President Donald Trump had officially renamed Lake Ontario.
"This is official, effective immediately," Trump told reporters Thursday after signing the executive order from the Oval Office. The president has taken to calling the easternmost of the Great Lakes "Lake America," a move he framed as a response to escalating trade tensions with Canada.
"Trump is so mad at Canada he renamed Lake Ontario Lake America," Maher told his studio audience. "Now I gotta buy a new globe again."
The rename follows a similar order earlier this year redesignating the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Both came amid a rapidly deteriorating trade relationship between the two North American neighbors. Negotiations collapsed late Friday, prompting the United States to impose 50 percent tariffs on Canadian goods — a dramatic escalation that White House trade officials said was triggered after Canada walked away from what they characterized as the best available deal.
But Maher reserved his sharpest material not for the geopolitics, but for the reaction from liberals outraged by the presidential pen stroke.
"The liberals are very pissed at this," Maher said. "They say you can't just go around changing things to fit your political agenda. Just ask any Latinx birthing person."
The line drew laughter, but it also crystallized a critique that has been building in conservative media circles for weeks: that progressive institutions have spent years successfully advocating for linguistic shifts — from gender-neutral demonyms to medical terminology — only to object when the same tactic is deployed from the right.
Curtis Houck, managing editor of the conservative media watchdog NewsBusters, argued the outrage rings hollow.
"The fact that 'Latinx' and 'birthing person' are increasingly accepted as a punchline rather than a serious demographic statement should give all of us hope that 'Woke One' is dead and we're never going back to that farcical time," Houck said. "If only the liberal, elitist media could more consistently get the picture. The left needs to take a seat before they can say anything about anything being renamed."
His colleague, NewsBusters executive editor Tim Graham, extended the argument to monuments and military installations.
"Liberals want to rename all kinds of things to satisfy their urge for wokeness," Graham said. "Just in this decade, they've pulled down all kinds of statues and renamed scads of military bases. What they hate is anything Trump does to add a patriotic pro-America tinge to something which they associate more with his ego than with patriotism. They see red — as in a red MAGA cap."
Graham contended that news organizations have routinely deferred to activist pressure campaigns on language, leaving them without standing to object when the executive branch exercises its own naming authority.
"The media routinely genuflect ethnic and LGBTQ pressure groups and their demands to remake the language we're all supposed to use," he said. "So they can't seriously object to renaming things. They just want to be the only people who get to rename things."
For now, the mapmakers have work to do. The tariffs are in effect. And somewhere in a storage closet, a globe of the Great Lakes waits for its next revision.
