Maher: ‘On the Left, There Is a Rot, and It Comes from Academia’

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother, Stanford Law Professor, Barbara Fried, arguing that a belief in personal responsibility is bad makes the FTX collapse the “epitome” of how while the problems on the right show up in more dangerous ways, “on the left, there is a rot, and it comes from academia and it filters down.”

Maher stated, “It turns out both his parents were professors at Stanford. … And the mother wrote an essay in 2013, ‘Beyond Blame.'”

After quoting from the essay, where Fried argues that “The philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy. It’s time to move past blame.” Maher reacted, “Is it really time? Personal responsibility is bad and blame, that’s a thing of the past? No wonder this guy’s a f*cking crook, you were raised wrong. You were raised wrong, asshole.”

He later added, “I brought it up because I really think — look, we are, I think, when historians look back at our time, they will not divide us into red and blue and Republican-Democrat. They [will be] like, the things that were wrong with us were wrong both sides in different ways. I do think they manifest in a more dangerous way on the right, but on the left, there is a rot, and it comes from academia and it filters down. … That’s where it’s all coming from. I just think this is an epitome of it.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett

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