Post by abbey1227 on Jul 31, 2021 12:45:29 GMT
Bill Maher Says Tokyo Olympics Are Out-“Woke”-Ing The Oscars, Proving Cancel Culture Is “An Insanity That Is Swallowing Up The World”
By Dade Hayes July 30, 2021 9:14pm
“Please don’t make the Olympics into the Oscars,” Bill Maher pleaded in his show-ending New Rules monologue in tonight’s return of Real Time to HBO after a month’s break.
Last April, as he reminded the audience, he said the theme of this year’s Oscar show was, “We dare you to be entertained.” Its producers, he griped, seemed determined not to let the audience forget for a moment the injustices and deficiencies of the human condition.
The Tokyo Summer Games, in Maher’s view, have outdone Hollywood. He reeled off a series of instances where officials and creative staffers faced consequences over decades-old behavior. In one case, the opening ceremony’s musical director was ousted over a 1994 interview in which he admitted to bullying fellow students when he was a child in school. “Remember when your teacher used to try to scare you, they’d say, ‘You know, this is going to go down on your permanent record,'” he said. “No longer an empty threat now.”
He also ridiculed media coverage of surfing becoming an Olympic sport in Tokyo. The Associated Press — not exactly some lefty activist outlet
— wrote that having surfing in the Games exacerbates cultural appropriation and “racial indignities.” That’s because non-Hawaiians have popularized and mainstreamed a sport with deep spiritual and communal meaning for its original participants. The article’s headline described the competition as a “whitewashed” event.While jokes still flowed and the early moments of the segment seemed fluid enough, Maher’s tone was pointed and his points more urgently made than in most weeks. (It could have been the host’s new glasses, which he broke out at the opening minutes of the show, calling them a permanent new accessory. In something of a teaser for the “New Rules” segment, he quipped, “They have progressive lenses. When I put them on, all I see is white privilege.”)
“This is called a purge,” Maher said of the climate in the U.S. and increasingly elsewhere. “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.”
As to charges that his stance means he has moved farther to the political right (a place on the spectrum given to reflexively denouncing cancel culture), Maher said, “My politics have not changed, but I am reacting to politics that have.”
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