On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher urged students not to go to elite colleges because doing so “just makes you stupid” and that these elite schools are “a North Korean re-education camp” that are racist towards Asian applicants that don’t teach history and “if ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market.”
Maher began by saying, “As an Ivy League graduate who knows the value of a liberal education, I have one piece of advice for the youth of America: Don’t go to college, and if you absolutely have to go, don’t go to an elite college, because, as recent events have shown, it just makes you stupid. There are few, if any, positives to come out of what happened in Israel, but one of them is opening America’s eyes to how higher education has become indoctrination into a stew of bad ideas, among them the simplistic notion that the world is a binary place where everyone either an oppressor or oppressed. In the case of Israel, oppressors being babies and bubbes. The same students who will tell you that words are violence, and silence is violence were very supportive when Hamas terrorists went on a rape and murder rampage worthy of the Vikings. They knew where to point the fingers, at the murdered. And then it was off to ethics class.”
He added, “Now, I recognize that a certain amount of foolishness is expected of college kids, but mixing Jägermeister and tomato juice isn’t the same as siding with terrorists. Thirty-four student groups at Harvard signed a letter that said, ‘the apartheid regime is the only one to blame,’ proving they don’t know what constitutes apartheid. They don’t know much of anything, actually. But it doesn’t deter them from having an opinion. They’ve convinced themselves Israel is the most repressive regime in history, because they have no knowledge of history, or even a desire to know it, and actual history doesn’t come up in their intersectionality of politics and genderqueer identities class.”
Maher further stated, “Now, to be fair, at least five of the student groups have rescinded what they signed, saying they didn’t read the letter closely and they promised not to make that mistake again after they graduate and start running the world. I actually believe them that they didn’t read the letter closely. I think they scanned it, [saw] it was blaming Israel, and went back to surfing TikTok. Because college life today is a day spa combined with a North Korean re-education camp. It’s a daycare center with a meal plan, except the toddlers can fire the adults. The fact that college presidents, who usually love to speak out about anything, couldn’t find their voice to condemn the worst attack [on Jews] since the Holocaust says a lot about who really controls colleges, and why, if ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market.”
He added that elite schools are “the mouth of the river from which…all manner of radical left, illiberal — yes, illiberal — nonsense flows, supporting all-black — that is, segregated — dorms, segregated graduation ceremonies and orientation programs — which occur on hundreds of campuses — is illiberal. So is the racism against Asian applicants, and chasing speakers off of campus.”
Maher further rattled off a list of right-wing figures who went to elite institutions and stated that it’s “repulsive” to watch them pretend they hate elitists.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett