‘Real Time’ is single-handedly trying to save the mental health of his own party who checked out years ago. The left continues to spiral out of control while Maher fights to make them see reason. On his latest show, Maher Bashed ‘woke’ liberals for their ‘presentism’ garbage. The idea is that people of the past should be held to modern standards.
The conversation began after Maher discussed a controversial essay by American Historical Society President James Sweet. The historian, who later apologized for writing that judging historical figures by contemporary standards “ignores the values and mores of people in their own times,” shouldn’t be sorry, Maher said.
“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,” Maher said, adding 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 added.
He then went over every civilization and race that owned slaves throughout history—Which is practically all of them. “Humans are not good people,” he added. Maher said slavery was not simply a racist institution, noting “the capacity for cruelty is a human thing, not a white thing.”
“Everybody who could afford one, had a slave – including people of color,” Maher said. “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, Maher said, puts “race, gay, gender, and colonizers” into a wokeness blender as if “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.”
Maheralso mocked liberals’ reaction to Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to send 50 illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard.
“The migrants, first, they went to Martha’s Vineyard, and then they — today, they sent them to Cape Cod,” Maher said. “Just throw in a stop in Nantucket, and it’s the same cruise I got my parents a few years back.”
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I don’t know if Maher, and other more level-headed liberals, will ever get through to the left extremists but it’s a nice reminder that not everyone on the left has lost their mind. In all my years I have never seen the left more dangerously close to socialism than they are right now. Voting against your own self-interest for free handouts never ends well. Just ask the thousands of refugee immigrants from China or Cuba.