Bill Maher had one request regarding the Tokyo Olympics: “Please don’t make the Olympics into the Oscars.” However, the “Real Time with Bill Maher” host seems completely disheartened that the 2020 Olympics was flush with woke messaging.
The liberal cable TV talk show host unleashed a rant about the “woke” Olympics, where he attacked cancel culture after people behind the scenes of the Summer Games faced consequences for their actions.
“This is called a purge,” Maher said of cancel culture spreading throughout the world. “It’s a mentality that belongs in Stalin’s Russia. How bad does this atmosphere we are living in have to get before people who say cancel culture is overblown have to admit that it is, in fact, an insanity that is swallowing up the world.”
The Tokyo Olympics’ creative director, Hiroshi Sasaki, resigned before the Games began for making a demeaning comment about a Japanese entertainer during online “brainstorming exchanges.”
The musical director of the opening ceremony, Keigo Oyamada, was forced out of the Tokyo Olympics after a 1994 interview with him resurfaced where he admitted that he bullied children with disabilities.
Maher then teed off on accusations of cultural appropriation during the Tokyo Olympics. Maher highlighted an article by the Associated Press with the headline: “Olympic surfing exposes whitewashed Native Hawaiian roots.”
Regarding surfing be an Olympic sport for the first time in history, the AP article said, “Some Native Hawaiians, surfing’s Olympic debut is both a celebration of a cultural touchstone invented by their ancestors, and an extension of the racial indignities seared into the history of the game and their homeland.”
“The Tokyo Summer Games, which open July 23, serve as a proxy for that unresolved tension and resentment, according to the ethnic Hawaiians who lament that surfing and their identity have been culturally appropriated by white outsiders who now stand to benefit the most from the $10 billion industry,” the article added.
Maher tore apart the idea of cultural appropriation, “Of all the violations of the woke penal code, cultural appropriation just might be the dumbest of all.”
“Most of human history is a horror story, but the good parts are about different groups coming together and sharing,” he said during the “New Rules” segment of Friday’s “Real Time” episode. “It’s sort of the whole point of the Olympics.”
“Newer doesn’t automatically mean better, this new idea that each culture must remain in its own separate silo is not better and it’s not progress,” the liberal pundit stated. “In fact, it’s messing with one of the few ideas that still makes this melting point called America great.”
Maher informed his fellow liberals, “Not everything is about oppression.”
“We live in a world where straight actors are told they can’t play gay roles and a white novelists aren’t allowed to imagine what it’s like to be a Mexican immigrant,” Maher continued. “Even though trying to inhabit the life of someone else is almost the definition of empathy, the bedrock of liberalism.”
On Saturday afternoon, “Bill Maher” was trending on Twitter where leftists bashed him and called him a “bigoted a**hole” and “less of a comedian and more of an aging narcissist with writers. He deserves criticism.”
Meanwhile, conservatives applauded his powerful segment.
Daily Wire commenter Candace Owens said of the segment, “This is great. Woke people are cancer cells to progress.”
Conservative radio host Chris Stigall added, “You simply don’t find liberals calling out there own as Maher often does these days. He’s no conservative. He despises my politics, but that’s ok. I can respect intellectual honesty on display.”
Outspoken British broadcaster Piers Morgan said, “Best 7 minutes of television this year. Thank you, Mr Maher, for being an ongoing voice of liberal reason in this increasingly insane illiberal woke world.”
New Rule: The Woke Olympics | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)
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