Bill Maher smashes woke historians: "The capacity for cruelty is a human thing, not a white thing"

Judging historical figures according to the modern ethic of wokeism is scholarly nonsense, Bill Maher declared Friday in his monologue about the "Unified Theory of Wokism."

The host began by saying that while at times conservatives tried to 'whitewash' the past also "many liberals want to abuse history to control the present."

The old-school liberal addressed the phenomenon of 'presentism' that attempts to "judge everyone in the past by the standards of the present" and the controversy surrounding the president of the American Historical Society. 

Last August, James Sweet president of the American Historical Society (AHA), and distinguished professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison published a column in the AHA newsletter, titled "Is History, History?: Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present," in which he said that "if history is only those stories from the past that confirm current political positions, all manner of political hacks can claim historical expertise."

In unison, a Twitter storm erupted, with some users demanding Sweet's resignation, claiming that his article was objectionable because it gave ammunition to the right. Sweet later apologized for his analysis and Maher came to his defense saying he shouldn't be sorry, that getting mad because in the past people didn't know better was like getting mad at yourself because of the things you did when you were 10 years old.

“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 stated, 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.

The old-school liberal also said slavery was not simply a racist institution, noting that "the capacity for cruelty is a human thing, not a white thing."

"Everyone 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 we invented in 1619. But slavery throughout history has been the norm, not the exception."

In recent times, American scholars have tried to revise history through 'presentism', such as the case of  The 1619 Project, which argues that slavery was one of the primary motivations for the colonies to seek independence from Britain and that the true founding of the United States took place when slavery began on the continent, not with the Declaration of Independence.

Its creator Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for the project, which many historians have challenged leading to the author herself having to retract her central claim that the colonists rebelled against England to preserve slavery.

Earlier this year Jones stirred up controversy when she claimed in a since-deleted tweet that 'tipping is a legacy of slavery.'

Maher acknowledges that history is indeed written by the winner, but much of it its "indisputable factual because we have artifacts, coins, and birth records and archaeology, and somebody in Mesophothamiia kept a record of how much grain they ate" the host noted, adding that "it is not all up in the air to change or delete based on what makes you feel better today."

He then recalled that "a couple of years ago they made a movie about the scientist who broke the record for the highest altitude in a ballon. In fact, they were both men," Maher said, "but the movie made one of them a woman because as the director said representation is important."

Maher humorously added, "so true women never get enough credit for the things they didn't do."