“Real Time” host Bill Maher on Friday’s episode blasted leftists who attempt to rewrite history in order to “control the present” narrative — a concept known as “presentism.”
Maher explained that presentism “means judging everyone in the past by the standards of present. It’s the belief that people who lived 100 or 500 or 1,000 years ago really should’ve known better.”
What are the details?
Maher noted that American Historical Society President James Sweet “caught hell” from leftists over an essay of his in which he criticized presentism — and then went to bat for Sweet by dismantling woke pronouncements leftists typically make to prop up their morality as compared to people of the past.
He touched upon slavery as an example: “Everybody who could afford one had a slave — including people of color. 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.”
Maher added that Africans gathered other Africans to sell to slave traders and “kept their own slaves” as well.
“Humans are not good people,” he quipped.
Maher added that “the capacity for cruelty is a human thing, not a white thing. That’s the truth, even though it doesn’t jibe with the current narrative. But in today’s world, when truth conflicts with narrative, it’s the truth that has to apologize. Being woke is like a magic moral time machine where you judge everybody against what you imagine what you would have done in 1066, and you always win.”
He added 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 was alive today, he would, too; and if you were alive then, you wouldn’t.”
Maher also pointed out a 2019 movie “The Aeronauts” — about scientists who broke the record for the highest balloon altitude. While both scientists who broke the record were men, Maher noted that in the movie the scientists were portrayed by a man and a woman.
When asked why that change was made to the historical record, the director replied that “representation is important,” Maher told his audience.
Megyn Kelly agreed with Maher’s presentism assessment, saying that he “nails it”.
* Article from: The Blaze
