Bill Maher defends Trump’s war with universities: ‘Academia needed a hot poker up the a**’

Comedian and unabashed liberal Bill Maher is once again defending President Donald Trump.

This time, Maher is siding with Trump on his hostility toward universities and agreeing that many campuses have become little more than “indoctrination factories.” While he may not agree with how the president is approaching the issue, Maher believes that something needs to be done to take these pompous colleges down a peg.

“I’m not totally against it. Academia needed a hot poker up the ass. I’m not saying— not everything, the way he’s doing it, of course, is the right way. You know, to defund scientific research is not the way to do it,” he said.

“But, I mean, our universities have been out of control for a long time. They became indoctrination factories,” the comedian added. “There’s absolutely no diversity of thought.”

Republicans have maintained their stance that most colleges are unwelcoming for anyone not willing to spout leftist orthodoxy, and the rise of antisemitism on campuses has done nothing to change their minds. Trump has vowed to effectively defund these places that won’t abandon “woke” ideology by threatening to shut off the federal funds that keep them afloat.

“Prestigious schools, including the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Cornell University, and others, have all seen their federal funding hit by Trump over either their alleged inaction on antisemitism or their policies regarding transgender athletes,” The Hill reported. “The Department of Education has also issued a letter to colleges saying if diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives weren’t eliminated, federal funds would be cut from their institutions.”

Maher pointed to the protests that broke out following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and the subsequent defense of Palestine and Hamas on college campuses that included short-lived occupations and demands to be excused from classes to engage in activism.

“You don’t have to be Donald Trump to think that there’s been something rotten on campuses for quite a long time. When you cannot speak the other side of the coin, when conservative thought — whatever you think of it — is just verboten, which is basically what happened,” he reasoned.

“And some of the ideas — I mean, why do you think they erupted, so many of them, in cheers for what happened on Oct. 7? Why do you have professors coming out there and saying they were exhilarated by this mass massacre of people? OK, that didn’t happen overnight,” he snarked, calling the campuses “ivory towers” that give off the aura of being “very anti-American.”