Bill Maher Says Trigger Warnings are Ruining America

Bill Maher railed on trigger warnings, saying they're creating a thin-skinned, ridiculously overly sensitive and weak nation ... and he has receipts that are hard to square with common sense.

The "Real Time" host was on a tear Friday night, positing not only that trigger warnings don't work, they actually make trauma worse by creating needless anxiety.

His overarching point -- life is hard, it's not always fair, and sometimes you gotta deal with meanness and other bad things ... and because of the cascade of trigger warnings, people no longer have the ability to cope.

As for examples, they're telling, sad and hilarious.

-- A Brooklyn theatre has a warning for a movie that contains "darkness and violence" ... the movie is "Oklahoma!"

-- London's Globe Theatre has a warning before staging "Romeo and Juliet" ... "includes suicide."  Not only is that ridiculous (the play's like 400 years old) ... it's kind of a spoiler.

And there's more ... college campuses have banned phrases they consider offensive, sexist, etc ... like "balls to the wall," "white paper," "peanut gallery" and "virgin."

Bill says Brandeis University has banned words and phrases it considers violent, like "killing it," "beating a dead horse," and, get this, "trigger warning!" As Maher says, school doesn't understand irony.

Short story -- we are trying to protect young people to a level of absurdity that will make them unable to cope with life.