Warning: If you are easily offended, DO NOT read this book regardless of where on the political spectrum you fall as he goes after both sides. That said, he has an almost obsessive hatred of Trump which is distracting but his other observations make it worth slogging through those sections, IMHO. Maher lets the reader know these essays are a group effort written by himself and his writers for his show Real Time, and he does give full credit. This book, however is his labor of love as he pulled together the writings that made sense for the points he wanted to make in this book.
Disclaimer: I disagree with Maher on some issues and agree with him on others. I follow him as I do many people with whom I disagree simply because I respect his integrity and wit and because I honestly believe that you can’t really know a person’s perspective unless you hear it from him and not from edited clips or propaganda slogans. However, this is not intended as a political post for or against either side. It is simply a review/summary of a book I believe is worth reading.
Anyone who has ever watched Maher’s Real Time program will be familiar with his acerbic wit. On that issue, he is at his best throughout this book. A few of the many issues he tackles include media, free speech, generations, fragility, cancel culture, cops, drugs and several more. Now for some excerpts so you can make up your own mind. These should give you a decent idea of a book I think is well worth your time.
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”I used to think something was ‘news’ if a journalist reported it, but really we live in a world where it’s ‘news’ if Kesha’s tit flops out, because Twitter will respond and then a ‘journalist’ ‘reports’ on ‘the controversy. If a boob flops in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it doesn’t make a noise. . . but if three jackasses tweet about it, it’s news.”
”America is a country whose children score low in math and science but off the charts in self esteem. A study of eight developed countries found that US students were dead last in math skills but number one in confidence in math skills, even though they suck at it. Yes, we’re number one in thinking we’re number one.”
“How we teach our kids history has become a big controversy these days, with liberals accusing conservatives of wanting to whitewash the past–and sometimes that’s true.
But the woke want to abuse history to control the present, and in 2022 a scholar named James Sweet caught hell for calling them out for doing just that. He criticized a phenomenon known as ‘presentism,’ which means judging everyone in he past by the standards of the present; it’s the belief that people who lived a hundred or five hundred or a thousand years ago really should have known better.
Which is so stupid–it’s like getting mad at yourself today for not knowing what you know now when you were ten.
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: the Summarians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the British, the early Americans–all the way up to R. Kelly.”
“Being woke is like a magic moral time machine, where you judge eveybody against what you imagine you would have done in 1066, and you always win. Professor Sweet is right about presentism: it’s just a way to congratulate ourself about being better than George Washington because you have a gay friend and he didn’t. But if he were alive today, he would, and if you were alive then, you wouldn’t. “