Maher Torches Woke Culture: ‘This Is Called A Purge. It’s A Mentality That Belongs In Stalin’s Russia.’

BILL MAHER, HBO HOST: And finally new rule, please don’t make the Olympics into the Oscars. Oh, what’s that? They they did already? Yeah. You know, back in April when the Oscars aired, I commented in this space that the theme of that evening was, we dare you to be entertained lest your mind waver for a few hours from thinking about the sad things and bad people in the world. Well, thank God we found some of those bad people in the Olympics now and not a moment too soon. [Audience claps] No, that was sarcasm. The director of the opening ceremony was fired hours before the event because they found out there was a Holocaust joke at a comedy routine he did decades ago. Well, you know, context is everything. Obviously it didn’t strike people as beyond the pale at the time, young people have to stop flattering themselves that they’re Nostradamus and would have foreseen had they’d been around then everything that’s unacceptable now, and for further context, Mel Brooks wrote one of the most successful musicals of all time around the song Springtime For Hitler.

Why do we allow the people who just want to b***h to always win? Days before that firing, the opening ceremonies musical director, musical director, was also forced out because someone dug up an interview with him from 1994 where he admitted to bullying classmates as a child. As a child. Remember when your teacher used to try and scare you by saying this is going to go on your permanent record? Yeah, no longer an empty threat now.

And the creative director of the entire shebang of the whole Olympics got s**t canned because he once made a fat joke in a private conversation. This is called a purge. It’s a mentality that belongs in Stalin’s Russia. How bad does this atmosphere we are living in have to get before the people who say, ‘cancel culture is overblown,’ admit that is, in fact, an insanity that is swallowing up the world.

And that is not a conservative position, my friends. My politics have not changed but I am reacting to politics that have and this is yet another example of how the woke invert. The very thing that used to make liberals liberals. Snitches and b***hes, that’s not being liberal. The Associated Press is a real news organization, yeah? So why am I reading this headline, ‘Olympic surfing exposes whitewashed Native Hawaiian roots?’ Yeah, the Olympics added surfing this year, good, surfers deserve to be recognized as athletes. I’m sorry, what I meant to say is no, that’s cultural appropriation. The AP says that for Hawaiians, probably all two of them, including surfing in the Olympics is an extension of the racial indignity seared into the history of the game and their homeland when white outsiders took over their spiritual art form, or just people having fun in the ocean.

I must say of all the violations of the woke penal code, cultural appropriation just might be the dumbest of all. First of all, there are 25,000 islands in the Pacific. How do we know a Hawaiian was the first to stand on a board in the water? It seems like something anyone in any ocean would eventually get around to. And if you’re a surfer, it doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, or in between you all taste the same to sharks.

But, let’s say a Hawaiian did invent surfing, should he or she have kept it to themselves? Most of human history is a horror story. But the good parts are about different groups coming together and sharing. It’s sort of the whole point of the Olympics, which itself comes from Greece, where wrestling was invented as a way for completely heterosexual men to get to know each other. Badminton has roots in India. Tennis comes from France. Skiing from Scandinavia and Taekwondo from Korea. Judo was appropriated from the far east and skateboarding from the far out. What is this new rule that the first thing to do, that the first to do something, are the only ones who get to have it? Jewish peoples, but most of their history wandering, but when they see other people milling around, they don’t say, can you not? That’s sort of our thing.

You know, change is not synonymous with progress. Nowhere 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. And in fact, it’s messing with one of the few ideas that still really does make this melting pot called America great. Not everything is about oppression, stealing natural resources from indigenous people. Yes, of course. That is exploitation. But I swear not one Beach Boys song resulted in any Hawaiian having less waves to surf.

Not one African record buyer stopped purchasing local music after Paul Simon made Graceland. But lots of white buyers in America were turned on to and then bought African music. And today, Korean boy bands make western style music. You don’t get to number one singing this. And that’s the great thing about cultural mixing. It makes things better for everyone. BTS can be a hit in America and I can get [inaudible]. Isn’t that better than everyone walling itself off from outsiders? I thought walls were supposed to be bad.

But we’re living now in a world where straight actors are told they can’t play gay roles, and white novelists aren’t allowed to imagine what it would be like to be a Mexican immigrant. Even though trying to inhabit the life of someone else is almost the very definition of empathy, the bedrock of liberalism. And by the way, if anyone deserves to bitch about stealing in the Olympics, it’s the horses in the equestrian events, who have to watch humans get medals for everything. They do.