In a statement issued this past Friday as part of his most recent “Real Time” lecture targeting leftists., Bill Maher stated that the holding up of historical figures up to modern-day woke values is entirely just bad scholarship.
The long-time liberal highlighted a point about so-called “presentism” as part of the “New Rules” segment of his HBO show while speaking about a highly controversial essay authored by James Sweet, the President of the American Historical Society. Maher claimed that the famed historian, who later stepped up to apologize for his work which criticized and judged historical figures through the lens of contemporary standards and stated that this “ignores the values and mores of people in their own times,” should not be sorry.
“Being woke is like a magic moral time machine in which you judge everyone by what you think you would have done in 1066, and you always win,” explained Maher, going on to add that presentism is “just a way to congratulate yourself about being better than George Washington because you have a gay friend and he didn’t.”
“But if he were alive today, he would too, and if you were alive then, you wouldn’t,” Maher stated.
The paper from Brooks labeled The 1619 Project and The Woman King as perfect working examples of his previously mentioned historical presentism, which kicked off a tidal wave of angry from the Left. Written by New York Times writier Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project claimed that the true founding of American happened as soon as slavery started in the area, instead of with the signing of the Declaration of Inependance. Quite a few historians have called out Hannah-Jones about the theory, and even the author herself was made to roll back portions of her central claim that the colonists fought against England to ensure the preservation of slavery.
After becoming a winner of a Puliter price for the 1619 Project, Hannah-Jopnes is now a professor at Howard University. At some point earlier this year, she exclaimed that the idea of top[ping waitresses adn waiters was just another form of slavery.
Maher claimed that slavery was not just a racist institution, saying that the “the capacity for cruelty is a human thing, not a white thing.”
“Everybody who could afford one, had a slave – including people of color,” expressed Maher. “The way people talk about slavery these days, you’d think it was a uniquely American thing that we invented in 1619. But slavery throughout history has been the rule, not the exception.”
Presentism, explained Maher, puts “race, gay, gender, and colonizers” into a kind of wokeness blender as though “the New World was a great big diverse dance club, and the pilgrims were the bridge and tunnel crowd who came in and ruined everything.”
Maher finished his statements by once again foing ofter modern progressive liberals, and joking about the liberals’ reactions to the sending of a group of Illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard by Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis.
“The migrants, first, they went to Martha’s Vineyard, and then they — today, they sent them to Cape Cod,” stated Maher. “Just throw in a stop in Nantucket, and it’s the same cruise I got my parents a few years back.”
