Bill Maher has booked alt-right favorite Milo Yiannopoulos to appear as the top-of-the-show guest on his HBO series Real Time this Friday, according to Deadline. The news comes a week after Maher expressed interest in speaking with Yiannopoulos (whose racist provocations had him banned from Twitter last year) after his scheduled appearance at University of California, Berkeley, was shut down by protesters.
“I’ve been a longtime critic of colleges shutting people up,” Maher said last Friday in relation to the Berkeley protests. “Free speech should be something [liberals] own.”
Maher’s vehement opposition to “politically correct” culture will certainly be a main topic of conversation between the two, seeing as it’s something Yiannopoulos has often used to excuse his extremist behavior. Yiannopoulos will not appear on the show’s panel segment—which typically includes a mix of liberals and conservatives—and instead go one on one with the show’s aggressively opinionated host. The two are very much on opposite ends of the spectrum ideologically, but Maher has proven to have surprising crossover appeal with right-leaning thinkers—most notably, perhaps, with regard to his views on Islam. No matter what direction their conversation goes Friday, this should provide one of the rare instances where Yiannopoulos will engage with a sharply liberal public figure before a wide, likely unfriendly audience. Given his past history of bigoted, inflammatory statements, it could get ugly.
Real Time With Bill Maher airs live Fridays at 10:00 p.m.
