Maher is not really a left-wing guy even if he has entertained the idea of being one, in his own mind. The guy is a centrist, center-left at best, a liberal, and a rather old school one at that.
I'm not surprised to see that the left is trying to run its purity tests on all the moderate-minded Democrats, and try to make them appear "uncool" and "not radical enough" to the younger generations. This is all to their benefit if they want to be dictating the narrative going forward.
The old style of being a cynical, sharp-witted secularist/atheist, who embraces the scientific model, is also going out of style in the left-wing ranks. It's now all about passionately embracing ideas that don't necessarily pass the test when they're being critically evaluated. This is creating a pretty big rift between the people who came up during the era of the Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky types of liberals and left-wingers, the individual thinkers, compared to the modern type of "anti-intellectuals"/social influencers who rely on collectivist thinking, peer pressure and mass movements of people rallying around a few slogans to support their ideology.
