Bill Maher is once again sounding the alarm about the Democratic Party’s steady drift to the radical left—this time using Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) as Exhibit A. During Monday’s episode of his Club Random podcast, Maher suggested that AOC could be a viable presidential contender, but only after what he called some much-needed “deprogramming.”
The conversation began when guest Patton Oswalt, a progressive comic, lamented that conservatives supposedly embarrassed themselves years ago by criticizing a video of Ocasio-Cortez dancing on a rooftop in college. Oswalt mocked Republicans for reacting to what he described as a harmless, even endearing clip. “They found the damning video of AOC dancing and drinking with her friends on the roof in college, and she looks so happy and beautiful and cool,” he said. “Oh, they think is ending her career because they never did this. They were never that comfortable to do this.”
Maher didn’t bite. Instead, he redirected the issue to the congresswoman’s ideological extremism. “Yeah, and if she had some deprogramming, she could be such a fantastic candidate,” he said, prompting Oswalt to ask what exactly he meant. Maher didn’t mince words: “She’s never going to resonate with people outside of the bubble that she lives in and the very far left.”
The longtime HBO host went on to note that even The New York Times—a paper he claims has been “squabbling” with him for years over the Democrats’ leftward lurch—recently acknowledged in a “huge editorial” that Ocasio-Cortez simply doesn’t represent the political center of the country. When Oswalt pressed him—“What? That she’s too far left?”—Maher gave a firm: “Yes. And that the only way Democrats will win again … is to be more moderate.”
Oswalt pushed back, insisting that if voters view AOC as too extreme, it’s a reflection of a “broken” political culture. Maher rejected that premise as well, arguing that the real problem is that Democrats have “freaked out” over a laundry list of cultural battles—gender, race, parenthood, schools, homelessness, crime, the border, and education—while ignoring where the broader electorate actually stands. “That is not where the country is,” Maher said bluntly about AOC-style politics.
Oswalt countered that the U.S. has been “freaking out” since Barack Obama’s presidency, implying that backlash to progressive policies was rooted in national immaturity. But Maher maintained that Democrats’ preoccupation with fringe positions has alienated working-class and moderate voters.
Maher’s critique of Ocasio-Cortez comes on the heels of his recent takedown of one of her ideological allies, NYC democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. On Real Time Friday, Maher warned that Mamdani’s hard-left agenda—embraced enthusiastically by a rising socialist wing of the Democratic Party—will become political poison for Democrats nationwide. He predicted those policies will appear in “every attack ad for the next two years,” and repeated similar warnings on CNN Sunday while asking, yet again, why neither major party can simply be “normal.”
With Democrats divided between far-left activists and an exhausted moderate wing, Maher appears determined to keep sounding the alarm—even if his own side doesn’t want to hear it.
