Comedian Bill Maher said he's largely given up on performing in front of college crowds in a recent episode of his podcast.
"They don’t want to hear anything they don’t already agree with," Maher said of young audiences during a conversation with fellow comedian and former "Everybody Loves Raymond" star Ray Romano.
"They don’t want their minds pried open, and you know what? Let somebody else do it," Maher said on the Sunday episode of his podcast, "Club Random."
Romano said young audiences would likely be divided over Maher's politics.
Maher, the host of HBO talk show "Real Time with Bill Maher," has become increasingly controversial on the left in recent years for his opinions on wokeness, political correctness, President Biden's age and contemporary politics.
"You would have half this way and half this way, maybe," Romano told Maher, referring to the opposite sides of the political spectrum.
"First of all, they would protest before I even got on the campus," Maher said.
"I was uninvited when I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Berkeley graduation and then re-invited, but today, are you kidding?" he continued, referencing when a student group at the University of California, Berkeley, attempted to stop Maher from visiting campus in 2014.
"These kids?" Maher said. "That would be the first thing they would do. They don't want to hear anything they don't already agree with."
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Maher said he respects the "exuberance" of youth, but doesn't believe that his age is a valid rebuttal to his criticisms.
"I’m not going to hold my tongue when they embrace stupid ideas," he said ."And of course, then they'll just say the tritest, easiest, most erroneous thing lobbed at people like us is: 'you're old, now it's about just get off my lawn.'"
"You put zero amount of thinking into the actual point I’m making," Maher said. "You didn't engage with the actual idea."
"What about the idea?" the comedian continued. "Am I right? Should we bring communism back because I think it's a bad idea? Maybe because I remember what happened the first time and you don't, and you don't care to learn."
