Bill Maher keeps warning his own party that its socialist wing is marching young voters toward a cliff.
Democrat leaders insist the kids only want cheaper rent, not a Marxist makeover.
And Maher finally named the culprit, one place Democrats guard like Fort Knox.
Bill Maher Handed Down a Verdict Hollywood Rarely Delivers
Maher saved his sharpest jab for the online “Overtime” segment of Real Time with Bill Maher, the part of the show HBO viewers have to go hunting for on the internet.
He opened with the standard liberal throat-clearing. The country already runs “a lot of socialism,” Maher said, and “a lot of it is appropriate. That’s not what these people are selling, these far-left people.”
Then he got to the point.
“That is a prescription for failure, and, to me, this is an indictment of our educational system. . . . The reason why they don’t know that socialism didn’t work in the past, to this degree, or Communism, is because nobody taught them in school. And they think they just were delivered down here on earth, there was no past.”
Maher is no convert to the conservative cause. He still lumps the Marine Corps in with socialism, and any Marine within earshot would happily set him straight on that one.
But on the classroom question, the HBO host hit the bull’s-eye.
And his timing couldn’t have been sharper. Maher made his remarks the night before Florida marked Victims of Communism Day, a November 7 remembrance the state created by law in 2020. The date lines up with the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, the opening act of a century of misery.
Ask the average 22-year-old what happened on November 7, 1917, and brace for a blank stare. That stare is exactly what Maher is talking about.
The Youngest Voters Give Communism a Pass the Oldest Never Would
The Cato Institute and YouGov surveyed 2,000 adults in March 2025. Among Americans aged 18 to 29, 62 percent held a favorable view of socialism, and 34 percent said the same about communism.
Cato senior editor Michael Chapman ran the numbers on that second figure. Roughly 52 million Americans fall in that age bracket, which puts the communism-curious crowd at around 18 million people.
But the slide didn’t stop there. Cato released another survey in late June 2026, and it found 38 percent of Americans under 30 viewing communism favorably, just seven points behind capitalism.
Now flip to the other end of the age chart. Among the oldest Americans in that same survey, communism’s favorable rating sank to 5 percent.
Five percent.
That generation came of age while Soviet missiles sat aimed at American cities and the nightly news carried footage of East German border guards gunning down their own countrymen at the Berlin Wall. Nobody had to explain to them what a communist government does to its own people.
The body count isn’t a secret, either. The Black Book of Communism, which Harvard University Press brought out in English, tallies roughly 100 million deaths at the hands of communist regimes in the 20th century.
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation saw this trouble coming a long way off. “When one-in-four Americans want to eliminate capitalism and embrace socialism, we know that we have failed to educate about the historical and moral failings of these ideologies,” Marion Smith, then the foundation’s executive director, said in a statement accompanying the group’s annual survey.
Florida Put the Truth Back on the Blackboard
Florida once made every high school student take a course called Americanism vs. Communism. The requirement stood from 1961 to 1991.
Maybe that’s handing one class too much credit. The seniors who brush off communism also lived through the Cold War on the evening news, and most of them never set foot in a Florida classroom. But back then, plenty of classrooms across the country still treated the Cold War as a contest between freedom and tyranny, and the generational line tracks Maher’s complaint almost perfectly.
In April 2024, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law requiring lessons on the history of communism in every grade from kindergarten through 12th. The mandate kicks in with the 2026-27 school year, the first year Florida students get the full treatment.
“We’re going to tell the truth about communism in the state of Florida. We’re going to tell the truth about the evils of communism,” DeSantis said at the signing.
He took a shot at the faculty lounge, too. “My view is we might as well give them the truth when they are in our schools because a lot of these universities will tell them how great communism is, so we are setting the proper foundation.”
The law covers the atrocities communist regimes committed abroad, along with the tactics communist movements used inside the United States.
And Florida Democrats couldn’t resist. Orlando Democrat Anna Eskamani, a state lawmaker at the time, wanted the lessons to make room for a Republican senator from the 1950s.
“Unfortunately, it is very clear today that that Red Scare that we experienced in our history is also very modern,” Eskamani said. “I think it’s important to include McCarthyism so that we also don’t repeat that part of our history.”
Lawmakers left McCarthyism out of the final bill.
Think about that for a second. Stalin and Mao starved and shot their way through tens of millions of people, and a Democrat’s big worry was that the kids might come away too suspicious of communists.
Democrats Need Students Who Never Heard of the Gulag
But Maher stopped one step short. He talks about “our educational system” as if it were the weather, something that just rolls in off the ocean.
Somebody runs those classrooms. The teachers unions that staff government schools pour their political money overwhelmingly into Democrat campaigns, and Democrats return the favor by fighting school choice at nearly every turn. Those same classrooms always seem to find time for gender ideology and climate doom, yet the Gulag rarely cracks the lesson plan.
And the payoff showed up at the ballot box. Socialist mayors now run four of the 20 largest cities in America: Zohran Mamdani in New York, Katie Wilson in Seattle, Nithya Raman in Los Angeles, and Janeese Lewis George in Washington, DC. Roughly 14 million people live in those four cities.
Raman knocked off incumbent Karen Bass to get there. She and Lewis George both belong to the Democratic Socialists of America, the outfit whose platform calls for public ownership of major industries and a classless society. Karl Marx would recognize the blueprint without reading past the first page.
Mamdani already floated city-owned grocery stores for New York. Ask anybody who stood in a Moscow bread line how that experiment ends.
Young voters didn’t stumble into that choice by reading too much history. They made it because nobody ever handed them the book.
But Democrats have every reason to keep it that way. A generation that never learned about the Gulag can’t spot the warning signs, and the DSA wing needs exactly that kind of voter to keep stacking up wins.
Nobody should be surprised if the first legal challenge to Florida’s communism lessons arrives with a Democrat’s name on it. The party already showed which chapter of the Cold War it wants the kids to read.
From 1961 to 1991, Florida required every high school student to take Americanism vs. Communism.
In the 2026 Cato survey, the oldest Americans gave communism a favorable rating of 5 percent. Among Americans under 30, the number hit 38.
Sources: Breitbart, “Maher: Young People Not Knowing Failures of Socialism, Communism An ‘Indictment’ of Schools”; Cato Institute blog, Michael Chapman on the March 2025 Cato/YouGov survey; Campus Reform, “Survey: Nearly two-thirds of young Americans support socialism”; The New American Left (Substack), on the June 2026 Cato survey; Washington Free Beacon, “40 Percent of Americans Favor Socialism”; FOX 35 Orlando, “DeSantis signs bill requiring communism history be taught in Florida public schools”; Miami Herald, “Florida K-12 students will learn about ‘atrocities’ of communism”; WJLA, “Florida public schools must teach ‘evils of communism’ under new law”; WFLA, “DeSantis signs bill mandating lessons on history of communism for schoolchildren”; Fox News, “4 of nation’s largest cities now led by socialist mayors after Tuesday’s election”; Breitbart, “Midterms: 14 Million in Four of America’s Largest Cities Will Now Live Under Socialist Mayoral Rule”; The Federalist, “Socialists Now Run Or Are Fighting To Run Four Of America’s Biggest Cities”
