Bill Maher slams woke college campuses: 'There is a rot, and it comes from academia'

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Bill Maher slams woke academia as the source of 'rot' for the left

"Real Time" host Bill Maher scorches liberal academia for spreading woke ideology, noting with his guests how destructive it has been in American life.

"Real Time" host Bill Maher and his guests slammed the "rot" from academia and woke ideology Friday for filtering down to destabilize civilization and democracy itself.

During a conversation about the FTX crypto scandal, Maher noted that Sam Bankman-Fried, known by some as "Millennial Madoff," has two parents who were professors at Stanford and his mother wrote an essay in 2013 titled "Beyond Blame." He ridiculed the premise of the article and suggest being raised around those kinds of academic ideas influenced Bankman-Fried personally. 

Maher quoted from the essay, where Bankman-Fried’s mother argued, "The philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy, it’s time to move past blame."

He scoffed and asked, "Is it really time? Personal responsibility is bad? And blame, that’s a thing of the past? No wonder this guy’s a f***ing crook. You were raised wrong, you were raised wrong, a**hole!"

Talk show host Bill Maher slams woke ideology in academia.

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Social psychologist Johnathan Haidt, appearing as a guest on the show, observed that research indicates that of the different disciplines, ethics books are the least likely to be faithfully returned to the library. He said, "There’s no sign that thinking and reading and studying ethics makes you more ethical, and one thing it does, is that it makes you very, very good at post-hoc justifications of whatever the hell you want to do."

Bill Maher quipped, "Kinda what religion is also."

Haidt said that the groupthink mindset of polarized groups are destabilizing countries around the world, "the more you hate the other side, the more you can justify anything because ‘they’re an existential threat to the country, and if we have to invade the capital to overturn the country’ or whatever, you see it on both sides." He warned that the more different sides hate each other, the less sustainable "liberal democracy" will become. 

"When historians look back on our time, they will not divide us into red and blue and Republican-Democrat. The things that were wrong with us were wrong with both sides in different ways. I do think they manifest in a more dangerous way on the right," Maher said. "But on the left, there is a rot, and it comes from academia, and it filters down. Am I wrong about that? That’s where it’s all coming from." 

HBO’s "Real Time with Bill Maher" namesake recently closed his show by tackling what he described as the LGBTQ "trend" he said has become prevalent among young Americans.  (REUTERS/Phil McCarten)

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Haidt later observed that many intellectual institutions, such as academia, the medical establishment and the courts, only function properly if there is "viewpoint diversity… if I say something and then people are going to challenge me."

He suggested that "structural stupidity" is a problem among some of the most educated groups of people when they have no viewpoint diversity.

"When everyone’s on the same side, and someone says something crazy like, ‘How about if we stop punishing people?’ and other people are afraid to object because that would seem to put you against a certain sensibility, and when that happens is a thing called ‘structural stupidity,’" Haidt commented.

"Real Time" host Bill Maher. (HBO) (HBO)

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Maher agreed, "Yes, we see it all the time."

Haidt reiterated the point, "You get really smart people, but you put them together, and they can't think straight, and they say stupid things from the left that just play really well on LibsOfTikTok and give the right-wing lots of ammunition."

Maher joked, "And you get Onion headlines as policy."