Bill Maher tears into the government for working with social media companies to shut down COVID-19 debate

Bill Maher, host of “Real Time,” wasted no time Friday evening in tearing into the government and social media platforms for clamping down on “dissenting opinions” concerning the origins of COVID-19.

Maher made a point to mention to guest Kara Swisher that as the years have gone by, the “dissenting opinions” on a host of issues “were quite the right ones.” These same dissenting opinions on important issues were previously limited or shut down completely on social media platforms.

The New York Post reported that the conversation about controversial opinions was kicked off after Maher brought up Murthy V. Missouri — a Supreme Court case that manifested after a lawsuit was filed by state attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana, claiming that government officials had worked with social media companies to shut down certain posts.

The posts that were allegedly censored were those that had to do with the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and the pandemic. However, Swisher did not appear to wholly agree with Maher, suggesting that it was a confusing time for everyone.

Maher went on to suggest that he had always been on the side that no one should be “shutting down debate about medical matters,” adding that “I was a dissenter on many of these issues.”

He continued by saying there were important voices that were shut down or discouraged at the height of the pandemic.

Fox News Digital reported that Mark Zuckerberg — owner of Meta — said that the “establishment… kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”

Swisher pushed back, claiming that no one will ever fully know the details.

However, Maher went on to provide examples of where speech was discouraged on certain topics.

“Okay, but we should have been able to argue about whether it came from a lab, which we weren’t. Things like that,” he said.

“Natural immunity — whether it was better to go to the beach and get sun and fresh air, as I would have said, as opposed to sitting home and day-drinking and putting on weight.”

When Swisher refused to fully concede to Maher’s point, he continued: “There were two doctors, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff. They’re from Stanford and Harvard, and they said, ‘We were shut down. Not always fully, but there are ways to do that.’”

“And they’re not radicals,” Maher added.

“They were saying that we’re going too far with school closures — again, I think, has been proved right. My question was always, ‘Why are your doctors more important than my doctors, the ones I want to listen to?’”

“And the social media companies were in the tank with the government,” the host concluded.