Marc Maron Gets a Cereal Box with a "Lifetime Ally" Badge

Maron: At this point, it’s lazy and sloppy and hackneyed, you know, to be in a club where, you know, I’m walking down the hall at the comedy club, or, and, you know, in one room, someone’s doing their bit about trans people. And then I get down the hall and there’s someone on stage going, “Well, I guess I got to do my bit about trans people.” Like, no, you don’t. You don’t.

It’s hack now. I mean, you know, you guys got the freedom you wanted. You can now say whatever you want. They’re defeated. The rights have been denied. The policies that you guys encouraged, which are your stupid material, are now policy. And now, like, you know, half the people under the umbrella of anti-woke, we’ve lost a tremendous amount of Democratic-leaning ideas and movements.

So whether they knew it or not, that’s what they were spearheading. So now it’s reality. And you want to still keep kicking them?

Mandel: I don’t know that the comedians have had that much power.

Maron: Are you out of your mind?

Mandel: No, I’m being serious. I’m not—go ahead. Go ahead.

Maron: You know, you can’t separate—like, if the movement is like, you know, “We’re being censored.” No, you’re not. You’re not. There’s no constitutional censorship issue with your free speech. You say things, and in a Democratic show of an environment, you know, like Twitter or whatever, there’s cultural pushback. But that’s a specific issue.

To frame it as some sort of free speech problem was a misdirect. It wasn’t. It wasn’t a free speech problem. It was that people were getting cultural pushback. That is not a constitutional issue. No one was being put in jail for saying anything. That’s a free speech issue.

But my problem is, you’re going to start talking about anti-woke, and that’s going to be your point of view. That’s going to be your ideological, you know, grounding for what you do. OK, that’s fine.

But why does it have to be the same four things? You know, it’s like they talk about the same—and I don’t know a better definition of hack. I mean, after a certain point, it’s like, you know, what juice is the word we really had? How much do you have to give trans people? You know, what is your big problem with gay people? What’s your big problem with women?

It’s like, what is this, the 80s again?