Friday on HBO’s Real Time, host Bill Maher said that “today’s woke revolution” has striking similarities to China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s under Chairman Mao and “we do have our own Red Guard here, but they do their rampaging on Twitter.”
Maher stated, “Yesterday, I asked ChatGPT, are there any similarities between today’s woke revolution and Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s? And it wrote back, how long do you have? Because, again, in China, we saw how a revolutionary thought he could do a page-one rewrite of humans. Mao ordered his citizens to throw off the four olds: old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits. So, your whole life went in the garbage overnight, no biggie. And those who resisted were attacked by an army of purifiers called the Red Guard, who went around the country putting dunce caps on people…who didn’t take to being a new kind of mortal being.”
He continued, “A lot of pointing and shaming went on — oh, and about a million dead — and the only way to survive was to plead insanity for the crime of being insufficiently radical, then apologize and thank the state for the chance to see what a piece of shit you are, and of course, submit to re-education, or as we call it here in America, freshman orientation.”
Maher then referenced the case of University of Illinois at Chicago Law Professor Jason Kilborn and stated that Kilborn had to wear the American version of the dunce cap, “eight weeks of sensitivity training, weekly 90-minute sessions with a diversity trainer, and having to write five self-reflection papers, a grown-ass man, a liberal law professor. If you can’t see the similarities between that and [the Cultural Revolution], the person who needs re-education is you. Yes, we do have our own Red Guard here, but they do their rampaging on Twitter.”