Politics & Power Quote by Bill Maher

Maher’s line works because it smuggles a diagnosis into a complaint, then dares you to argue with the framing. “The country has become much more conservative” is broad enough to feel like an obvious cultural weather report; “partly because” pretends to be measured, a nod to complexity that actually tees up his real target. The punch is “taken over,” a verb of occupation. He’s not describing voters drifting right so much as a hostile capture, an insurgency with a flag and a pulpit. That’s classic Maher: politics as a battle between the allegedly sane and the zealots, with comedy as the permission slip to say the impolite part out loud.

The subtext is less about conservative economics than about moral governance. “Religious right” invokes a specific American coalition: culture-war Christianity, anti-abortion activism, school-board censorship, “family values” branding, and the post-9/11 fusion of patriotism with piety. Maher isn’t trying to persuade the devout; he’s rallying the secular and the uneasy middle, people who may not identify as liberal but don’t want theology underwriting policy.

Context matters: Maher came up as the late-’90s culture shifted into early-2000s polarization, when evangelical influence in the GOP felt newly explicit and national. The line’s intent is to name that influence as a takeover rather than a constituency. It’s a strategic insult: not “they won,” but “they seized,” implying something illegitimate and reversible. That’s why it lands with his audience and irritates his opponents. It turns a political trend into a thriller plot, with the “religious right” cast as the antagonist.