Kyle Kulinski is one of the most popular political commentators on YouTube, with over 2 million subscribers to his Secular Talk channel. He’s also a co-host, with Krystal Ball, of the Krystal Kyle & Friends podcast, and a co-founder of Justice Democrats, the progressive political organization that helped elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and other left-wing members of Congress. Most importantly, though, he’s now a regular writer for Current Affairs, with a feature article in our upcoming print issue: “How Bill Maher Lost His Mind.” (To read the article when it’s fresh off the presses, subscribe today!) Kyle joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to talk about Maher’s embarrassing decline, the El-Sayed campaign in Michigan, and why the Trump administration is guilty of terrorism from the Middle East to Latin America.
Watch the video version here:
Nathan J. Robinson
Maybe you could start by telling us what makes Bill Maher actually kind of interesting.
Kyle Kulinski
Yes, so for me personally, I remember Politically Incorrect, his show. At first it was on ABC, and then I think it was Comedy Central or vice versa. It’s him sitting around with three or four other people, usually celebrities, and they talk about the hot topics of the day. He had a way of being kind of witty and funny, and he would talk about topics that were certainly taboo, especially for 1990s television. He would talk about abortion. He would talk about religion. He would talk about all sorts of things that back then were like, “Ooh, don’t talk about that in public.” He ended up getting fired from there because he said that the 9/11 terrorists weren’t cowards. He said [something like], “Say what you want about them. You could say they’re evil. You could say whatever you want, but they’re not cowards because they stayed in the plane as it hit the building.”
Robinson
Was he wrong?
Kulinski
No, he wasn’t wrong. And see, therein lies the enigma of Bill Maher, the interesting aspect of Bill Maher. So for me, I really got very interested in his stuff during the early years of his Real Time with Bill Maher show, because there were very few voices at the time that were consistently against the Iraq War and that consistently called out George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. People don’t remember, there was an era there where you literally couldn’t have a show if you were critical of George W. Bush and the War on Terror. For example, Jesse Ventura was supposed to have a show. I think it was on MSNBC at the time. They ended up canceling it because he was against the war. Ashleigh Banfield lost her job because she was against the war. There was—
Robinson
Kulinski
Phil Donahue, exactly, another one. So there were really two or three years there, maybe even a little longer, where there was nobody. Later on, Keith Olbermann came along, but in that era, the one voice that was consistently calling out the neocons and George W. Bush and the stupid war in Iraq, and would argue for things later on like a left-wing version of the Tea Party, was Bill Maher. And so as a young, I’d say somewhat impressionable kid or teenager at the time, I’m looking at it, and something about his confidence, bordering on outright arrogance, was very intriguing to me.
Robinson
Did he share your own confidence, bordering on outright arrogance?
Kulinski
I think I was born with that. But he was the only voice saying those things, and he was saying it with a lot of certitude. And so, to a young guy like myself who was just coming into my own politically, reading Richard Dawkins books and Noam Chomsky books and watching his show, he actually helped shape my worldview at the time pretty strongly, I would say.
Robinson
I didn’t realize that in the early days of Real Time he’d had people like Chomsky, like Ralph Nader, Jeremy Scahill, and Amy Goodman.
Kulinski
Glenn Greenwald at the time.
Robinson
But it’s kind of crazy, actually, because those people really are not on television. Unless you watch Democracy Now! you have no idea who Amy Goodman is.
Kulinski
Right.
Robinson
So, credit where it’s due, but then we have to explain and understand the transformation. So maybe first, if people don’t watch Real Time, having explained what Bill Maher was in the ’90s and in the Bush era, tell us what Bill Maher is now.
Kulinski
The transformation has been wild to watch. He basically has now morphed into—it’s kind of tough to label him, but you could say an enlightened centrist who fancies himself above partisan politics, splits the difference between the left and the right, but always finds a way effectively to give credit to MAGA, give credit to Trump, give credit to the right, and endlessly shit on everybody to the left. He’s never said a positive word about DSA. He’s been very critical of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He now spends most of his time, I would say, trying to say, “I’m kind of liberal, but I’m one of the good ones. I’m not like those crazy DSA-type people.” He went from supporting Bernie Sanders in 2016 to Amy Klobuchar in 2020, and I always say he’s the only Bernie to Klobuchar voter in the country. And now, not only did he go to dinner with Trump and then sort of talk him up after that, but now I just saw today that he’s meeting again for dinner with Trump. So he’s really become almost like—I don’t know if it’s the wealth. I don’t know if it’s the fact that he’s an old white guy now. I don’t know if it’s the fact that he’s in his Hollywood bubble and he’s surrounded by yes-men. But he’s really become the most pathetic version of himself.
Robinson
The Trump thing is very strange, though, because a lot of those wealthy liberal types are very anti-Mamdani and very anti-DSA, but they’re horrified by Donald Trump, and Maher is a very particular kind of centrist who is literally more comfortable with the hardcore fascist right than with the social democratic left. Help us understand that kind of centrist.
Kulinski
I would say he does this “I’m not like the other girls” type thing, where he has to nitpick every criticism of Trump now and almost make the right wing’s arguments for them and say, “Oh, you have Trump derangement syndrome. Are you talking about Trump’s obsession with the ballroom that he wants to build? Well, I’m not like the other liberals because I don’t really care much about the ballroom. And so, if you’re talking about that, you kind of have Trump derangement syndrome.” So he does this thing where he nitpicks the left in a way that’s hypercritical, and he does the opposite when it comes to the right. He’s always looking for areas where it’s like, “Hey, I might not agree with them on much, but you got to hand it to them on this, or you got to hand it to them on that, or this thing was taken out of context, or that thing’s unfair.”
And so ultimately, it’s a similar thing that we’ve seen with other political figures during the Trump years. There’s, of course, the classic case of Dave Rubin, who was working with the Young Turks and considered himself a leftist, and then he eventually ended up being “the last liberal,” as he called it, and then now he’s just a right-wing hack. We saw a similar thing with Jimmy Dore, who was also with the Young Turks and claimed to be a leftist, but then he spent all of his time beating up on Democrats and none of his time beating up on Republicans, and now he’s effectively this weird brew of conspiratorial anti-establishment centrism, but that effectively bolsters only the right wing. And Maher is his own flavor and his own variety of that. And it’s been crazy to watch. It’s almost like he hopped on the bandwagon of a very internet culture-type thing two or three years too late, that “I left the left and I’ve now seen the light” stance. And he just did it two or three years after others who came before him. Now I think he genuinely finds himself in no man’s land. I’m not sure what the ratings are for his show, but I know for sure that all the old-school fans of Bill Maher are not there anymore. So he either has new right-wing fans or basically half the audience he used to have.
Robinson
But he was saying we need to be a more socialist country. He would use that word. He would say we need an anti-war party. We need a democratic equivalent of the Tea Party. And the thing is that I didn’t realize—I didn’t really think about this until reading your piece, where he says he wanted all these things, and then all those things came along. We’ve got that now. We have this thing that you wanted, if you were a person in 2008 and you were frustrated with Obama. We have the left. You should be really excited if you were someone who was asking, “Why don’t we have a viable political left?”
Kulinski
And I can tell you exactly why he turned on it. Number one, the people bringing it about are for the most part young and brown. He seems to have an issue with that. Number two, they’re “woke,” as he would call it. So they’re not only left-wing on economic issues; they’re also left-wing on cultural issues, and he’s uncomfortable with that. And then number three, they’re anti-Israel, and therein lies, I think, one of the main issues. He’s always kind of been a die-hard Zionist, but in the past he didn’t talk about it as much. Prior to 2014, Israel wasn’t in the news as much. I can’t remember how he talked about 2014 after Israel leveled Gaza, but he’s always been a Zionist. But over the years now, it’s gotten worse. And when Israel did a genocide in Gaza, he really became very defensive over that, and is protecting his own view of Israel and himself as, “No, we’re the civilized ones; we’re the enlightened ones.” And “the Muslim savage barbarians” have to somehow always be at fault.
Robinson
The last few years in Palestine, with the genocide, have really revealed how illuminating that concept was, which predated October 7 but became very vividly clear afterward: “progressive except for Palestine.” I think Marc Lamont Hill co-wrote a book with that title. There’s a number of people who really can sound like progressives, but then once the Israel-Palestine issue comes up—I have a friend who lives in the suburbs of Detroit in a very heavily Democratic but affluent suburb. And as soon as Abdul El-Sayed started running, all of these people, many of whom would consider themselves in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party but are very pro-Israel, all of a sudden had all these anti-Abdul signs, and now there are all these “Democrats for Mike Rogers” signs all over the neighborhood. It’s because of one thing. It’s one thing, and it’s all Israel-Palestine.
Kulinski
One hundred percent. Maher does this thing, and you see this with Zionists all the time, where they’re generally against ethnostates, but my ethnostate is different. This ethnostate is different. This one is special, so we can pretend like it’s a democracy and there are universal human rights while also clinging to the ethnostate. And they don’t see a contradiction there. They don’t see a problem. They don’t see the logical end result of having an ethnostate with a two-tiered system, being incredibly oppressive in order to enforce its standards.
And it’s funny with Maher because he notices this when it comes to the left, oftentimes where he says, “One of the problems with the left and woke people is that they accuse people of bigotry and racism too much. They’re quick to trot that out based on absolutely nothing.” And then Bill Maher, when it comes to the issue of Israel, he is very quick to trot out charges of antisemitism based on literally nothing other than criticism of the Israeli government. So in many ways, he’s the worst kind of Zionist you can imagine. It’s kind of impossible to hang on to being a progressive person, or a social democrat, or a socialist—it’s kind of hard to hang on to that and your ardent Zionism. At some point, there’s going to be a tug of war there, and either your progressive side is going to win, or your Zionist side is going to win. And with Bill Maher, the Zionist side is winning.
Robinson
When you use the word “Zionism,” I think there was a recent Atlantic article that was trying to sow confusion here by saying, “What does the left mean by Zionism? Is it that some people just use it as a coded term for antisemitism? It’s so confusing. It’s a very contested term. What does it mean?” I find that very strange, because to me it’s quite obvious what it means, which is, do you believe that there should be a state in the area that comprises Israel and Palestine, whatever the borders are, that prioritizes one ethnic group over another? Do you believe that there should be a formally Jewish state that is for the Jewish residents of that territory and explicitly for them, rather than the Arab residents of that territory? And if you believe that, that’s Zionism. And if you don’t believe that, that’s anti-Zionism.
Kulinski
And to your point, it is supremacist by its very nature, and that’s the problem with it. So liberal Zionism, in many respects, is a bit of a contradiction. And you can see that in Israel, over time the right is winning the argument, because they have a more logically consistent argument within the framework of a supremacist state, an ethnostate. And with Bill Maher there’s no attempt to square the circle of “Hey, am I progressive? What’s going on here?” It’s just a confused mishmash of an old white guy who’s having an identity crisis and getting worse and worse by the day.
Robinson
The classic phrase was that liberal Zionism meant “I believe in a Jewish and democratic state,” and it’s like—
Kulinski
How does that work?
Robinson
That requires squaring a circle, because it’s either one or the other.
Kulinski
Right. Ask Bill Maher what he thinks about creating a Black nationalist state. “Hey, should Black people get their own state because there was a horrible history of racism and segregation and Jim Crow and redlining? Should they get their own state?” He’ll be very clear-eyed on why that’s wrong, but with Zionism, he can’t see it.
Robinson
There was a letter from some conservative Jewish Democrats regarding Abdul El-Sayed saying, “Well, we can’t support Abdul until he affirms that he believes in the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.” And you just think, that’s like asking a Black candidate in the 1980s, “Do you affirm that South Africa can be a white state? Unless you affirm that, we can’t support you.” How is he ever going to support that? He can’t support that!
Kulinski
No, and I think a lot of these articles about Abdul and the reaction to Abdul from Zionists—I feel like it’s a lot of concern trolling, and it’s basically just trying to twist his arm into supporting Israel by basically extorting him. It’s very manipulative the way these articles are written, because they’re not actually representing any actual constituency. Abdul and his positions represent the base of the Democratic Party. You can’t say, “Well, you have to change your mind on this issue in order for me to vote for you.” Okay, but if he were to change his policy position on that issue, he would lose more voters than he would gain. So what are we even doing here?
Robinson
Yes. Also, I just don’t think you could ask a Muslim guy to endorse an anti-Muslim apartheid and expect that’s ever going to get anywhere. I’ve never asked you what you think of Abdul, but when I see his combative personal style, I always think of your advice because he kind of embodies the “dark woke” thing that you’ve been pushing, where he’s willing to fat-shame Mike Rogers.
Kulinski
I think he’s brilliant. Look, not everybody can pull it off, but he’s incredibly intelligent. He’s incredibly charismatic. He’s incredibly confident. And I said this on my show: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen somebody more on-message than Abdul. Every single time he opens his mouth, he brings it back to, “I want to stop spending money on wars. I want to stop sending money and weapons to Israel. I want to take that money and give you healthcare and give you education.” He never doesn’t say that, and it’s working phenomenally well. They tried to trip him up the other day and ask him, “Well, what if Israel was attacked first? Would you then be okay with sending defensive weapons to Israel in that scenario?” And it was really a gotcha attempt. And Abdul didn’t miss a beat, and he said, “Did I stutter? I want to spend our tax money here.” And then Mike Rogers walked right into the trap and basically said, “I would send the money to Israel, and this guy wouldn’t.” And it’s like, “Have at it, buddy, because this is going to backfire on you.”
Robinson
It’s very nice to see so many politicians, from explicit DSA candidates like Zohran to Abdul, who’s obviously not a socialist but is from the social democratic wing of the party, who really do seem to have learned from Bernie. Because, as you say, Abdul is the best you’ve seen, but Bernie would never shut up about it. He would just always pivot back to, “This is an oligarchy. We have to end the oligarchy. That’s what I’m running on.”
Kulinksi
Bernie is a machine. He will educate you about his policy issues, and there’s no doubt about it. You’ll walk away knowing exactly what that man stands for, and he’s very popular because of that. I think Abdul is a little more willing to get in the mud than Bernie is, and Abdul is a little more ready for a 2026 style campaign. He’s not afraid to take some shots that in the past may have been looked at as low blows, but in 2026 it’s mild compared to anything Trump does on a random Tuesday.
Robinson
That’s why I say that it reminds me of you because he had that famous phrase: “When they go low—”
Kulinki
“We choke them out in the mud.”
Robinson
I thought, “That’s a very Kyle thing to say.”
Kulinski
True, true. You know what? It’s working for him. I love how he’s been saying repeatedly, “I’m going to beat Mike Rogers by seven.” I’m like, “Holy shit, this is more balls than I have. I don’t know why I’d say that if I was running!”
Robinson
There’s a level of arrogance, but I think people like it.
Kulinski
They’re waiting for it.
Robinson
Trump’s whole philosophy was, if you bully someone and it’s effective, then you bully them more. That’s what you do. And we saw with Obama, where he was like, “Oh, let’s compromise,” their response was, “Thank you, you’re a socialist who’s destroying Western civilization.” He’s like, “Can I give you a little more?” And they’re like, “Thank you. Also, you’re still a socialist who’s destroying Western civilization.”
Kulinski
One hundred percent. Trump has changed the rules of politics, and Abdul is meeting the moment. I think what Abdul knows is that there is a hunger for this on the Democratic side. Democratic voters have been waiting for somebody to show up who says, “I feel exactly like you feel, and I’m done with these people.” And he’s manifesting that, and I think we’re going to see a lot more candidates in that mold moving forward.
Robinson
I have my criticisms, but one of the other things I like about Abdul, and this could sound elitist, but don’t you like having someone who knows their stuff? Abdul wrote the book on Medicare for All, so if you ask him how to pay for it, he literally has a PhD in health policy. And then he was saying, “When I’m in the Senate, and RFK Jr. tries to use some medical terms that he doesn’t understand, I know what the terms mean, so I can humiliate him because I actually know what I’m talking about.”
Kulinski
We need to be honest about the fact that there absolutely is an IQ gap between the elected Democrats and the elected Republicans. It’s an uncomfortable thing to say, but I have never been more convinced of it than I am right now. It is embarrassing. If you’re following Trump—Trump is saying things now on a daily basis that make you think, “It’s time to take Grandpa’s keys away from him.” But the Republicans are marching right off the cliff like lemmings.
Robinson
I rewatched “Idiocracy” the other night because I though, “How much did this foretell our future?” And it did, a little bit, but it didn’t quite capture the cruelty. I was thinking, “This would be nice, because these were nice morons.”
Kulinski
Right. Oh, that’s such a great point. I’ve thought often about “Idiocracy” in these past couple years, but you’re right. There was a naive niceness to their ignorance and stupidity. I’ve been saying this on my show and to Krystal: isn’t it crazy how the stereotype of the evil genius is actually the exact opposite of the truth? Because what Trump and his cadre of idiots show is that they’re all dumbasses. The most evil people are also really, really stupid, and it just so happens to be the case that a lot of the smartest people want to fix things and want to make things better. So the Hollywood trope of the evil genius—it’s not a thing. That doesn’t exist.
Robinson
Oh, I know, and I think you see that with Elon Musk. I’m sure you’ve listened to Peter Thiel and Alex Karp talk.
Kulinski
Yes.
Robinson
Have you noticed that they’re the most inarticulate guys you’ve ever heard? When Peter Thiel talks, he cannot express a point.
Kulinski
Right. And billionaires have used this for their propaganda, where they’ve flipped the perception into, “Oh, he’s the misunderstood, socially awkward uber-genius. There’s so much going on in his head that he can’t actually articulate it. So actually, his stupidity and inability to finish a sentence is evidence that he’s actually even more brilliant than you think.” This is how they flipped it, but I think now people are beginning to realize that is just completely and utterly not true. That these are some of the least impressive people we’ve ever seen. They’re not the hardest working. They’re not the smartest. And it just shows how you know capitalism is a bit of an anti-meritocracy, if anything. It’s not a meritocracy. That’s for sure.
Robinson
Well, I interviewed on the program the guy who wrote the book about the dismantling of USAID, who was the whistleblower, and he was saying, “They came in, and Musk and his team just had no idea what the agency did. They killed hundreds of thousands of people in part because they didn’t even know what they were talking about with this agency."
Kulinski
My favorite story about that is—remember what happened with the screw worm? So for people who don’t remember what happened with the screw worm, we had this program. It only cost $3 million or something like that. But you would send planes to South America and Central America, and the U.S. government would drop a particular kind of fly in that area, and the whole reason for doing this was because that fly eats the screw worms, and then the screw worms basically can’t migrate to the north and get into our beef supply. And Elon Musk took one look at that and said, “Why are we dropping flies over Central and South America? This seems like a stupid waste of millions of dollars. So let’s cut it out.” Then, boom, we get screw worm, and you have to kill off a bunch of the cattle. The beef market gets way more expensive. And to your point, these are not smart people. He didn’t even bother to look up why that program exists. He just cut the program, and then we had to deal with the consequences later. And now Trump’s bringing in Argentine beef, which is pumped full of this horrible chemical, which makes people sick. They have really destroyed everything that’s good in this country.
Robinson
We are getting an interesting education in what government does. Because it’s easy to say, “Wow, that federal government—they just waste all your money. I don’t know why we inspect the food. What does the CDC do? That’s just a bunch of nerds in lab coats. What does that do? Nothing. Let’s find out what it does by getting rid of it.” RFK is launching this very interesting educational project to teach people what their government does by taking it away.
Kulinski
Yes. And now you wake up, and every day it’s a recall of a new thing. There’s plastic in this food, there’s glass in that food, and there are rocks in this food. You get salmonella and E. coli from this and that. Eating a blueberry or lettuce in Donald Trump’s America is a revolutionary act because you might shit your brains out and die.
Robinson
And the vaccine thing too. I feel like vaccine skeptics—if it weren’t for the fact that it causes kids to die when you don’t do it, I’d say, “Okay, you know what? Let’s try it. Let’s try no vaccines. How about that? Let’s see what happens.”
Kulinski
And now we know. There’s already a big measles outbreak. We’re relearning the most basic lessons. I do think in many ways we’re devolving as a society—we’re getting worse as a society.
Robinson
Your channel was Secular Talk, and you came out of the skeptic movement of the mid-2000s, which I feel was distorted away. There’s this weird funhouse mirror version of skepticism that people like RFK practice, where just because an expert says it, it must be wrong. Whereas the real skeptical position is, just because an expert says it doesn’t mean it’s right, but there’s this thing that the Joe Rogans of the world get into, which is like, “Well, if it comes out of science…” And you’re like, “No, no, no, that’s not skepticism.”
Kulinski
Right, they are just flat out anti-modern medicine. And I always said it’s healthy to be skeptical of big pharma, and it’s healthy to be skeptical of the profit motive that capitalism has, which leads to price gouging and things of that nature. It is not rational, it’s not logical, and it’s not skepticism—it’s cynicism if you’re against all modern medicine, which they literally are. They will take the word of somebody who wrote a blog in 2007 that doesn’t have a degree on some shitty website—they’ll take that person’s word over a doctor with a PhD who’s a brilliant expert in their field and is world renowned. It’s very weird. There’s this hippie-to-right-wing pipeline, and RFK comes out of that, where originally they had these very communal and collectivist ideas, and then over time they become more individualist, and then they end up believing a lot of junk science and are skeptical of all the things that are good about modern medicine and science.
Robinson
I’m really excited about the fact that leftists are getting organized. This could be a much more bleak moment if we didn’t have people like Mamdani and Abdul, or if we didn’t have an organized DSA. But it does concern me—we just interviewed Naomi Klein and Astora Taylor about End Times Fascism, their new book, about the comfort that many on the right have with apocalypse. I’m sure you saw Tucker Carlson saying that he talked to Trump, and he asked, “But what if everyone dies?” and Trump said, “Ah, you know, we all die.” And it’s like, oh my God, this guy doesn’t care if this ends in nuclear war because he doesn’t care about a world that doesn’t have him in it.
Kulinski
You’re 100 percent right, and I feel like people really haven’t internalized this yet, and they really haven’t wrapped their mind around the consequences. Look at a guy like Mike Huckabee, who’s the ambassador to Israel. This is a guy who quite literally thinks Jesus is going to come back to the Middle East on a winged horse, but in order for that to happen, you need Israel to control the entire Middle East. He’s in favor of a Greater Israel. He said to Tucker, “I think they should take all this land.” And you look at a guy like that, you have to understand, he’s truly a die-hard fundamentalist evangelical Kool-Aid drinking psychopath who’s actually waiting for Jesus to come back. And so you have that perspective, which is many people in the regime.
And then to your point, you have the malignant narcissism of Donald Trump, where, like you said, he genuinely doesn’t care if the world exists beyond him because there is no world beyond him. It’s just a dangerous brew, man. What we’re seeing now is what it looks like when there are no rules, there are no regulations, and there are no guardrails. All the people who reeled him in even a little bit in the first term are not there anymore. And now you see what it’s like when it’s like, “Let ’er rip."” And when you say “let ’er rip” with these guys, they’re cutting pediatric cancer research, they’re cutting meals on wheels. There are 700-odd hospitals shutting down because of their big bullshit bill; they’re literally stealing gold and oil from Venezuela and abducting and kidnapping world leaders, bombing girls’ schools in Iran. And it can get worse. Believe me, as bad as it is now, it can get worse.
Robinson
Well, it gives me chills when I see the comfort with violence that people like Pete Hegseth have and the fact that Trump is just so totally gung ho about AI. Is anyone going to tell him that AI shouldn’t get to decide whether to launch a nuclear weapon? Is there anyone in the administration who believes that AI shouldn’t get to make that decision? Is there one person? I really hope so.
Kulinski
And they’re also financially invested in AI as well. That’s the other element of this regime: the corruption is cartoonish. It’s a sick joke. They got rid of Kimberly Guilfoyle after her corruption scandal, and I said to Krystal, “The only reason they’re doing this is that she and Don Jr. broke up, and she’s not part of the inner circle anymore, and her corruption was really comical.” But every single person in the Trump crime family is swimming in money. So I almost feel bad for her in a weird, perverse way, because all of them are on a historic crime spree.
Robinson
Okay, but addressing the situation first and foremost requires us to be honest and to understand reality. And one of the things that I really appreciate about your work is your willingness to tell us uncomfortable truths. I mentioned the previous article you did for us, which I want to close on here, which is “Yes, the United States is the World’s Biggest Terrorist." This came out of yet another round of Hasan Piker discourse, in which Hasan was being lambasted for saying that the United States was worse than Al Qaeda if you looked at it just in terms of the body count. Your piece, which was based on a video you did, was about how that’s just true.
Kulinski
The thing, Nathan, that’s so interesting to me is that there are certain things that, as leftists, we view as so insanely obvious it barely even gets to the point of commenting on it. To us, it’s like, “Duh. Who cares?” It’s as if I walked in the room and said, “Two plus two equals four.” Congrats, you mathematician! How amazing is that? We view this as the most obvious thing in the world. And what we tried to do in the piece is lay out why we say this. Here’s the evidence. If you look at it, it’s really not a debatable point. This is a point that Noam Chomsky was making back in the 1990s or 1980s. He’s been out there saying this for a really long time. But now we’re at the point where, and this is the interesting thing, in this new Trump era, people are beginning to realize even the old Sam Harris argument of, “But we don’t have the intent to kill the civilians; it’s just collateral damage, and it happens by accident” isn’t true. I think they’re actually perfectly fine and perfectly happy to kill civilians on purpose. I think they attacked the Minab girls’ school on purpose, killing 170 precious little girls because they triple tapped it. They triple tapped it! They also bombed a sports hall where there was a girls’ volleyball practice going on. Trump says all the time on Truth Social over there, “I’m going to annihilate an entire civilization tonight.” There’s not much ambiguity here. There’s not much gray area. He’s literally announcing to the world, “We are the baddies. We are going to do the evil thing. We are going to do the terrorism.” I guess it’s time for people to wake up. I’m trying to wake people up out of the casual beliefs you have by default when you’re a kid: “Oh, we’re the good guys, and we’re trying to make things function properly, and we’re the world police.” Actually, we are the psychotic serial killer down the block, and now people are beginning to recognize it more and more.
Robinson
I wrote an article shortly after yours that was called “Benign Intentions Are Worthless,” which is, at a certain point, that it doesn’t even really matter if you intend to drop the bomb on an elementary school or if you just don’t care if the bomb falls on an elementary school because those amount to the same thing. They lead to the same place. So if you’re just not checking whether the buildings you’re dropping it on are schools, that’s not a mitigating factor because one of those buildings could be a school.
Kulinski
It’s a great point. And also, I would argue, if you think about it in your personal life: somebody gets in their car, they’re driving, and they accidentally hit somebody and kill them, it’s manslaughter. That happens on Monday. Three weeks later, they go out again on a Wednesday. They’re driving. They accidentally hit somebody with their car and kill someone again. So that’s two instances of manslaughter. Three weeks again in the future, they go for another drive. They hit somebody and kill them. At some point, are you really accidentally hitting them, or is it on purpose? Because it seems like you have this perverse thing where you want to hit people with your car, and that’s the U.S. foreign policy summed up. It’s all the time going after civilians, killing civilians, and creating maximum death and horror. Trump brags about stealing natural resources from countries now. He’s bringing back old-school imperialism and colonialism, and now I think again people are waking up to the fact that no, we’re not the good guys. We were never the good guys. We’re doing what every empire throughout history has always done. We’re no better. We’re no smarter. And if anything, we’re rolling the clock back to a more open, brutal version of these ideologies.
Robinson
One of the things in the piece is the starvation of Cuba. I know U.S. media doesn’t care about Cuba and is happy to pretend that this isn’t happening, even though it’s 90 miles off the Florida coast. We’re starving an entire country to death on purpose, and it’s literally for the explicit purpose of forcing political change, which is the classic definition of terrorism. That’s the definition, if you’re inflicting harm on people in order to bring about a political outcome—that’s the difference between terrorism and ordinary murder. I don’t see much attention to that in the Western press.
Kulinski
Yes, and to your point, it’s very depressing when you think of the state of our media, where you have these things that are just world historic atrocities. They will be written about in the future as Nazi-level atrocities, and it’s just not even mentioned—barely mentioned, or mentioned in passing in a way that sort of seeps accountability and responsibility from the US. It’s gross, man. But that’s why Current Affairs is thriving, my channel is thriving, and a lot of us are, because people want the truth, and we’re just pointing out the obvious and talking about it.
Robinson
Let’s conclude on a positive note. I mentioned at the outset here that while your article was bleak in many ways, and people don’t want to confront what it looks like for their country to have wiped out an entire school of little children—it’s a very hard thing to think about—that article was more widely read than anything we’ve ever posted on the Current Affairs social media. The reason was that there are a lot of Americans, and I think in the years since the genocide in Gaza began, the Palestine movement has shown that too, who have consciences and who don’t like it when they see what their government is doing in their name, and they recoil, and they get angry.
Kulinski
And like Abdul says, let’s stop spending our money on that and start spending it here at home. That is not a radical notion. That’s not an extremist notion. I would argue that’s a moderate notion. Now it’s just a matter of doing it.
Robinson
Yes. Another point is that the supposed centrists, people like Bill Maher—to bring it back to where we started—really ultimately have a very radical point of view, and that’s why they end up in bed with people like Donald Trump. There is nothing moderate about this kind of politics.
Kulinski
One hundred percent. If you’re splitting the difference in 2026 between moderate Democrats and the far-right fascist MAGA movement, you’re just admitting “I’m a half-fascist. I’ll play footsie with fascism.” And like I said, he’s in no man’s land at this point. They’d much rather have him go full hardcore MAGA and basically become Sean Hannity, and the left doesn’t want him. Even liberals don’t like him anymore. I know plenty of liberals who are certainly more centrist than I am who are like, “I’m sick of this guy.” So I don’t know who this is for. And I think if he’s being honest with himself, he probably knows on some level that he’s confused and what he stands for is not anywhere near what it used to be. There was a time when it seemed like this guy actually wanted to make the country better. He wanted to stop our warmongering foreign policy, and he wanted people to have healthcare and all that stuff. Like you mentioned earlier about the “New Rule” segment about how we need a Tea Party of the left, and we’ll call it the Donner Party, and they need to pass laws that mandate you can get an abortion at the McDonald’s drive-through—it’s humorous, and it’s also pointing to left-wing values, and here we are, and he’s not that guy anymore. It’s that simple.
Robinson
Well, fortunately, people don’t have to watch Bill Maher because instead they can watch the Kyle Kulinski show, and they can get a little bit of the attitude that Maher might have had in 1998. So I really hope everyone picks up this issue and checks out this article. It draws from a wealth of insight that Kyle has had on Bill Maher over the years.
Kulinski
My best article yet. Let me tell everybody, it’s my best article yet, and I really hope people read it. I really hope they get Current Affairs. I get my Current Affairs to my house.
Robinson
There we go.
Kulinski
Everybody get on that.
Robinson
That’s the plug we need. Kyle, I really enjoyed working with you on this, and I think the end result is phenomenal, and this is actually important. I understand why people wouldn’t want to think about Bill Maher, but it’s a study of how someone can transform and lose their good politics. I think it’s actually important to understand how this process occurs so that we can see in ourselves if we are ever doing this.
Kulinski
Thank you, my friend. Thank you.
Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.
