“Traitor” is too strong a word to describe Gu but I understand why some of her critics have reached for it to capture the depth of the betrayal of which she’s guilty.

Gu is the breakout star of the Olympics, having won two golds and a silver in skiing. She’s also a talented pianist, scored 1580 on her SATs, got into Stanford, and is so gorgeous that she models professionally. She’s a California girl, born in San Francisco to a Chinese-American mother. She should be the pride of the U.S.

She’s a national disgrace. She chose to compete for a genocidal regime, China, at the Genocide Games rather than for her home country.

Gu has justified her decision in different ways. She did it to honor her mother; she did it to promote skiing in China; she did it to serve as a role model for Chinese women athletes. It’s nonsense. Maher knows why she did it: She had 31 million reasons to do so. Gu seems to have made a shrewd calculation that by competing for China she could continue to fish in two very lucrative ponds. Chinese companies will lavish her with endorsements for having chosen their country over the United States. And amoral American companies won’t hold her snub of the U.S. against her in making their own endorsement decisions.

Why should they? No one understands ignoring crimes against humanity for the sake of making a buck in China as well as corporate America does.

“When I’m in the U.S., I’m American, but when I’m in China, I’m Chinese,” Gu likes to say. Patriotism doesn’t work that way, especially not with a country that within the past three years alone has unleashed a global plague, crushed democracy in Hong Kong, threatened war with Taiwan, and operated a system of concentration camps for religious minorities. Gu may be young (she’s 18) but she’s plenty old enough to have formed a moral judgment about how China does business. By choosing to compete for them anyway she’s become a willing propagandist for an evil regime, a living, breathing billboard that the CCP has done nothing so terrible that a daughter of the United States shouldn’t proudly ally herself with them.

She should never be forgiven.

In fact, partly due to Chinese law and partly to protect her commercial appeal there, Gu has even been coy about retaining her U.S. citizenship:

Since early this year, questions have repeatedly been raised about her citizenship. China does not recognise dual-nationals, and under Rule 41 of the Olympic charter, Gu must be a Chinese citizen in order to compete for the country. And if this is the case, analysts say, she would not be able to retain a US passport simultaneously…

Gu has always dodged the question about her citizenship in public. In response to a Guardian question about her critics, she replied: “I’m an 18-year-old out here living my best life. I’m not going to waste my time trying to placate people who are uneducated, and don’t experience the gratitude and love I have on a daily basis.”

That suggests that Gu, China, and the IOC are following a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to her citizenship. Gu has presumably declined privately to relinquish her American citizenship, having seen from the case of Peng Shuai that being a star athlete won’t protect a Chinese citizen when they cross Beijing. But she’s willing to keep her national allegiance ambiguous publicly in the name of skirting the rules so that she can compete for China. And neither the Chinese government nor the Olympic Committee chose to press her on it, thereby avoiding having to disqualify an appealing young star who serves their respective interests.

Ironically, some Chinese nationalists are annoyed that Gu won’t frankly state her intention to become a citizen of China. It’d be ironic justice if her attempt to play both sides of an ideological struggle between the classically liberal west and the totalitarian east ended with her alienating each camp.

Here’s Maher placing Gu within the broader trend of American celebrities bowing and scraping to China in the name of keeping Chinese money flowing. Imagine a top-tier German-American athlete choosing to compete for Germany at the 1936 Olympics because Hitler promised him a bunch of advertising deals and you have some sense of the scope of her moral failing. It doesn’t make her a traitor, exactly, but it certainly makes her unpatriotic. Remember that in case some company puts her in an ad here in the U.S.