Bill Maher mocks ‘woke’ attitude at Olympics

HBO’s Bill Maher slammed cancel culture at the Tokyo Olympics, going after a “woke” attitude at the Games.

“Please don’t turn the Olympics into the Oscars,” the comedian and liberal commentator said during Friday’s episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher.” “Oh, what was that? They did already?”

“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 from thinking about the sad things and bad people in the world,” Maher said.

“Well, thank God we found some of those bad people now in the Olympics, and not a moment too soon,” he continued. 

How bad does this atmosphere we’re living in have to get before the people who say cancel culture is overblown admit that it is in fact an insanity that is swallowing up the world? #WokeOlympics pic.twitter.com/P9rJNs6nrs

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) July 31, 2021

Maher pointed to several ousters that occurred leading up to the Games, which he called a “purge.”

The creative director of the Olympics, Hiroshi Sasaki, resigned in March after comments he made about a female entertainer’s weight resurfaced.

Just before the Tokyo Games opened, the director of the opening ceremony, Kentaro Kobayashi, was fired after a video resurfaced showing him saying, “Let’s play Holocaust” during a comedy sketch in 1998.

Days before Kobayashi’s firing, a composer working on the opening ceremony, Keigo Oyamada, stepped down after an old magazine interview resurfaced in which he bragged about bullying.

“This is called a purge. It’s a mentality that belongs in Stalin’s Russia,” Maher said. “How bad does this atmosphere we are living in have to get before the people who say cancel culture is overblown admit that it is in fact an insanity that is swallowing up the world?”

Maher continued by saying his politics have not changed but that “I am reacting to politics that have.”

“This is yet another example of how the woke invert the very thing that used to make liberals liberals. ‘Snitches and bitches.’ That’s not being liberal,” he said.

Maher then blasted the notion of cultural appropriation, which he said “just might be the dumbest of all,” in the “woke penal code.”

“Stealing natural resources from Indigenous peoples, yes, of course that is exploitation,” Maher said while arguing that “not everything is about oppression.”