Bill Maher Savages Oscars for Honoring Indian Tribes Who Once Called LA Home: ‘Give the Land Back or Shut the F**k Up’

Bill Maher savaged Hollywood and the left for honoring Native American tribes who historically called Southern California home during the Oscars last week.

Maher blasted progressives for romanticizing ancient cultures and invited wealthy LA County residents to either cede land back to the ancestors of native people or “shut the fuck up” about it.

On Friday’s edition of Real Time, Maher played an excerpt of the 97th annual Academy Awards in which actress Julianne Hough kicked off the show with a nod to Native peoples.

“We gather in celebration of the Oscars on the ancestral lands of the Tongva, Tataviam, and Chumash peoples, the traditional caretakers of this water and land,” she said last week.

Nods to LA’s historic inhabitants have become more common as Hollywood has more or less embraced the idea that the industry is operating on occupied land – an idea Maher shredded on Friday’s show.

“And finally, new rule memo to Democrats,” Maher said. “If you ever want to win an election again, the absolute most important first step is stop doing this.”

The host aired the clip of Hough from last Sunday’s Oscars and blasted the notion that the tribes were entitled to LA’s prime real estate.

“I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Either give the land back or shut the fuck up,” he said.

Maher added:

Look, I understand the desire to right the wrongs of the past. Especially when you get to take the moral high ground and then build an 8,000 square foot mansion on it. And I’m sure Julianne Hough is sincere about her love for the Chumash people, but I doubt she drives to work in a canoe, scavenges for acorns, or lives in a dome house made of reeds and dried mud. That’s Woody Harrelson. If you want to thank a tribe for Hollywood, start with the Jews.

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Can we please get over this idea that ancient people weren’t just as full of shit, in fact, more full of shit than humans today? It’s so simplistic, this idea of guilt by civilization, that being ancient and indigenous and not us was always better than us. It wasn’t. The Māori in pre-colonial times were, like most indigenous people, quite warlike, frequently fighting other tribes, with the winners enslaving the losers and even eating them.

Maher harped on progressives for portraying modern culture as savage while he said they ignored historic atrocities committed by Native Americans.

“Today’s hippies love to harp on how the 1950s was backward and the 1950s was backward, as every past era was,” he said. “But somehow, they see indigenous life in the 1550s as the pinnacle of enlightenment.”

He concluded:

Besides being ignorant, it’s hypocritical because, you know, the ancient lifestyle is available to you. You could live outside and forage for food and wash your clothes in a pond. We have that today. It’s called being homeless, and it sucks.

It was no fun being alive before anesthetics or refrigeration or germ theory or the fork or face time. Socks are great too. But Bill, they lived in harmony with nature. Yeah, they had to because no one had invented the toilet yet. The march of civilization has been bloody and painful, but we generally got to a better place, not a worse one. And not just technologically, but how we treat each other.

Watch above via Real Time with Bill Maher.