WATCH: Bill Maher Blasts China as ‘Sh*t-Hole Superpower,’ Rips Olympian Eileen Gu for Joining Their Team
Comic and pundit Bill Maher tore into China as a “shit-hole superpower,” and ripped gold medalist Eileen Gu and other athletes for ignoring or excusing human rights abuses.
On Friday night’s edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the host devoted the end of his “New Rules” segment to a rant against China’s human rights abuses, the failure of American companies and athletes to stand up to the regime, and Ms. Gu for choosing to represent the country after she was born and raised in the United States:
Someone has to tell China you can steal our trade secrets, our software, and our intellectual property, but we draw the line at our hot freestyle skiers. Now, if you’ve been like me over the past few weeks glued to your TV, watching the Olympics, that makes exactly two of us who…
We knew that were shithole countries, but who knew there was a shithole superpower? But. I’m sure you’ve heard about American citizen Eileen Gu, the beautiful model influencer and now Gold Medal-winning skier who was born and raised here in America, but who chose to ski in the Olympics for China. Cool, huh? Is it? Is that cool now, to choose to represent a totalitarian police state over America?
The Olympics pretends to only be about sports, but of course, the games have always been a bit of a proxy war for which country has the best system. And by choosing Team China, Eileen Gu became a living symbol of China’s triumph over the West, which wouldn’t bother me so much if I thought China had triumphed over us in the ways that really matter. But they haven’t.
Now we do have human rights issues right here at home we do, but we’re still, at least for another three years and… a democracy based on freedom, and they are an authoritarian surveillance state based on how would you like to disappear for a few months? Like that tennis player who recently vanished for a while when she said she’d been raped by a government official.
We do still throw too many black people in jail, but perspective matters. China has basically jailed an entire ethnic minority, the Uighurs, a situation that both the Trump and Biden administrations has called a genocide. America is not close to that, and it’s a cynical dodge to pretend that China’s sins should be overlooked because we all do it. No.
Watch the full segment above via HBO.
