Bill Maher talks cancel culture and John Lewis with authors of Harper's open 'letter on justice'

An open letter decrying the "intolerance of opposing views" published last month in Harper's Magazine got another moment in the spotlight Friday on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher".

Two of the letter's proponents, former New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss and "Self-Portrait in Black and White" author Thomas Chatterton Williams, talked to Maher about the pitfalls of cancel culture.

Weiss told Maher that illiberalism, defined as intolerance, is different than criticism.

"We're used to criticism. Criticism is kosher in the work that we do, criticism's great," she said. "What cancel culture is about is not criticism, it is about punishment, it is about making a person radioactive, it is about taking away their job."

July's open letter in Harper’s Magazine was spearheaded by Williams and signed by Weiss as well as other notable writers, artists and academics such as J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood. The authors decried the weakening of public debate and warned that the free exchange of information and ideas is in jeopardy amid a rise in what they call “illiberalism.”

The letter comes amid a debate over so-called cancel culture and prominent people coming under attack attack for sharing controversial opinions on social media.

Weiss told Maher that the Harper's letter was a "warning cry from inside the institutions." Weiss recently resigned from the Times due to "constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views," among other factors.

She recently stirred up controversy when she tweeted about the "civil war" going on inside the Times in the wake of uproar over Sen. Tom Cotton's (R-Ar.) viral "Send in the Troops" opinion piece.

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Weiss said cancel culture isn't "just about punishing the sinner," but also a "secondary boycott of people who would deign to speak to that person or appear on a platform with that person." She added that if conversation around disagreement becomes impossible then the only way to resolve conflict would be violence.

The former Times staffer said that "politics has come to supplant religion" and you see it with people on the right who look to Donald Trump as a "deity" and you see it on the left "where to be anything less than defunding the police or abolish the police to choose the issue of the day, makes you something like a heretic." She added that this type of thinking points to the "collapse of moderates."

Maher noted that it's not just the celebrity elite who believe they will be chastised for saying something politically incorrect and that people "don't like walking around on eggshells."

"When the science has to come second to the political correctness, we're in trouble," Maher said before reading off part of Harper's letter that noted "professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes."

Williams said that cancel culture is not about bringing "elites back to Earth" but it has an "onlooker effect" that has "a chilling and stifling and narrowing influence on all of our behaviors."

He added that the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, who died at 80 from cancer on July 17, also had a "point of view that was divergent from the consensus at the time that he was alive." Williams said that Lewis' stance seems "so clear to us now," but at the time Lewis was going against "consensus."

"We need to have all the points of view that we can have because we don’t know what the truth is actually going to shake out to be 10, 20, 50 years down the road," Williams said. "We need to challenge our consensus views, and when we think about John Lewis, we should think about that was a guy who saw something wrong and stood up and spoke up for it, and he didn’t just adhere to the prevailing consensus at the time."

More: Twitter's cancel culture: A force for good or a digital witchhunt? The answer is complicated.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Bill Maher, Bari Weiss talk cancel culture, Harper's letter on justice