On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher discussed comedian Hasan Minhaj fabricating stories of bigotry and argued that “emotional truth” — the term Minhaj used for his made-up stories — is just a left-wing euphemism for making up conspiracy theories like false flag operations and crisis actors.
Maher said, “This dangerous idea that has taken root in America that something is true merely because you want to believe it’s true has got to go. I have spent an awful lot of time on this show in the pre-Trump and then the Trump presidency years trying to convince people that this man would never concede losing an election, no matter what the truth was. And what made me so sure of that was that America had become a place where truth no longer mattered. It was all about whether it felt right in your gut. Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden? That can’t be right, that’s what many of his fans said, and still do. Any time an issue didn’t go their way, the response would be, crisis actors, that’s what that was, f*cking crisis actors, false flag operations, the Deep State. When the right does this, we call it ‘conspiracy theories,’ and rightly so. When the left does it, we call it ’emotional truth.’ Which brings me to Hasan Minhaj, the comedian who answers the question, what if Jussie Smollett did stand up?”
He added that Muslims and non-white people have faced prejudice in America, and America’s bad history with race still exists to some degree, but “it’s not as good as the right says it is, and I think it’s also not as bad as the left says. But if you have to fabricate the stories of your mistreatment, isn’t that itself a comment on where we are now?” Later, he said, “I think the younger generations have a real problem with wanting to build their identity around being a victim, they want to have racism to fight — not fight racism, have racism to fight — so badly that when it’s not there, they make it up. And there’s enough real racism in the world that making up more doesn’t help.”
Maher further stated, “If you want to speak truth to power, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you have to include the truth part.” Maher then wondered how Minhaj’s falsehoods are any different than Trump claiming that he saw thousands of Muslims cheering on 9/11 before stating, “This country needs to make a grand bargain, bullsh*t is bad, no matter who says it or what you call it.”
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