Bill Maher discussed the ongoing fallout around leaked Young Republican group chats on Friday, wondering whether or not the staffers caught praising Adolf Hitler represented the wider party.
During the “Overtime” segment of his HBO series “Real Time,” Maher threw the question to guests Mark Cuban and Andrew Ross Sorkin after getting in a crack at the parameters of the Republican youth movement.
“Young Republicans, they’re up to 40,” Maher said. “Obviously, we condemn [what they said]… how representative is it of Republicans as a whole?”
“You can’t just dismiss the fact that it happens a lot,” Cuban said. “It doesn’t take everybody to be racist for an organization to be racist.”
While Maher balked at painting the entire Republican Party with the same brush, he did admit that only one party seems to be welcoming of racist viewpoints.
“To be a Republican, we certainly shouldn’t say they are all racist,” he said. “But if you’re racist, you probably are a Republican.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Maher and his guests wondered about the ethics of reporting on leaked group chats and whether the people caught up in the scandal should lose their jobs. All three guests came to the conclusion that it’s impossible to put the toothpaste back in the tube and that Young Republicans should be held accountable for the things they said, even when they expected privacy.
“If somebody’s saying ‘I like Hitler,’ I’m going to have a problem with that, now matter how it got under my transom,” Maher shared.
Cuban offered that Young Republicans should be smarter about the things they put in writing.
“Everybody is going to get hacked at some point. So you have to know that your stuff is going to be read,” he said.
Watch the chat below via YouTube:
