On Friday’s segment of Real Time with Bill Maher, host Bill Maher slammed the left-wing, woke academia for creating a “rot” that is filtering down to America’s youth.

Maher was discussing the recent FTX crypto scandal when he made the comment that FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was “raised wrong” by his mother, who is a law professor at Stanford University.

Bankman-Fried’s mother, Barbara Fried, wrote an essay in 2013 titled ‘Beyond Blame,’ in which she argues that “The philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy. It’s time to move past blame.”

Maher expressed his strong disagreement with Fried’s perspective on personal responsibility. “Is it really time?” Maher asked. “Personal responsibility is bad and blame, that’s a thing of the past? No wonder [Sam Bankman-Fried’s] a f***ing crook, you were raised wrong. You were raised wrong, a**hole.”

Maher was joined by social psychologist Johnathan Haidt, co-author of the book ‘The Coddling of the American Mind.’  Haidt commented on the idea of groupthink and how polarized groups are playing a major role in the destabilization of countries around the world.

Haidt explained the dangers of groupthink, saying, “The more you hate the other side, the more you can justify anything because ‘they’re an existential threat to the country.'”

The two of them then went on to discuss the way this kind of thought is impacting American society as a whole, primarily focusing on the damage being done by its very polarized, left-leaning academic establishments.

“When historians look back on our time, they will not divide us into red and blue Republican-Democrat,” said Maher. “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… But on the left, there is a rot, and it comes from academia, and it filters down.”

“Am I wrong?” asked Maher. “That’s where it’s all coming from.”

Haidt agreed with Maher, saying, “Part of what’s happening here is that we have certain institutions in our society… the academy is the premier one, the medical establishment, the courts are another – and these only work if you have viewpoint diversity. They only work if I say something and then people are going to challenge me. And, the academy has always leaned left, and it’s not necessarily a problem. The police lean right, and it’s not necessarily a problem.”

“Maybe you should have some viewpoint diversity, not be ‘orthodox academy,'” continued Haidt. “Because, when everyone’s on the same side, someone says something crazy like ‘How about we stop punishing people?’ and other people are afraid to object.”

“And when that happens, what we get is, what I think we can call ‘structural stupidity,'” said Haidt. “That is, you get really smart people, but you put ’em together and they can’t think straight. They say stupid things from the left.”

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