On March 27, 2022, during a live television broadcast of the 94th Academy Awards, popular actor Will Smith hijacked the ceremony by storming onstage to slap comedian Chris Rock for a tame joke about Smith’s actress wife, Jada Pinkett. Then Smith returned to his seat and, in an epic explosion of Hollywood narcissism, spewed profane threats at Rock, which were broadcast around the world, sucking all the air out of an event designed to showcase the achievements of his fellow artists. Some speculated that Smith’s meltdown stemmed not from a chivalrous defense of his wife’s honor, but from the pent-up humiliation of being wedded to a woman who publicly insisted on having an “open marriage.”[1]
Instead of being ejected from the event and arrested for the assault, Smith was given the Best Actor Oscar moments later and received a standing ovation from the celebrity colleagues whose showcase he had just hijacked and trashed. As composer Oscar Levant once quipped in regard to Hollywood’s moral spinelessness: “Beneath the Tinsel of Tinseltown is … tinsel.”
Not long after Smith’s shocking performance, the world tuned-in to the pathetic spectacle of actor Johnny Depp’s anti-defamation lawsuit against his abusive ex-wife, actress Amber Heard. Trial testimony included such sordid revelations as: rampant drug and alcohol abuse (Heard reportedly drank two $500 bottles of wine a night, while Depp himself regularly spent as much as $30,000 a month on wine); mutual accusations of physical abuse; and the allegation that Heard defecated on Depp’s side of the bed when he tried to break up with her.
These are just two of the most recent examples of the moral bankruptcy of the Hollywood elites. For all their glamorous parading on red carpets, and their self-righteous posturing about social justice, Tinseltown is teeming with permanently damaged children and spoiled brats.
These are the same poseurs who powered the #MeToo movement but still defended and even honored the depraved director Roman Polanski, who drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl in 1977[2] – prefiguring the exploits of “America’s Dad,” comedian and TV star Bill Cosby.[3] They turned a blind eye to disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults[4] while he was making them stars until the avalanche of accusations rendered him unable to boost their careers anymore. At the same time they were engaged in moral preening, they were fighting tooth-and-nail to deny one of Hollywood’s greatest directors, Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront, East of Eden), an honorary Oscar because he was anti-Communist and they weren’t.[5]
Recently, audiences on both the Right and the Left have been turned off by Hollywood’s hypocrisy, condescension, and “woke” derangements. Studio executives now have to look to China for profits, having been forced to rely less on the domestic box office. The streaming giant Netflix is hemorrhaging subscribers. Hollywood awards shows, which stars have turned into personal soapboxes for political dementia, are plunging to record lows in viewership year after year.
Fearless British comedian Ricky Gervais called out the Hollywood elites for their hypocrisy and fading significance when he hosted the 2020 Golden Globes Awards show. He savaged them over their predatory friends such as Weinstein and the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The celebrities squirmed in their seats as Gervais told them not to bother giving political speeches when receiving their “little awards:” “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything,” he said. “You know nothing about the real world.”[6]
This was a brutal dose of inarguable truth. And yet the mainstream media regularly grants a megaphone to these virtue-signaling narcissists, who live in the most thought-conformist bubble of any demographic in the country. Filmmaker Rob Reiner, for example, aptly known as “Meathead” in his role in the 1970s sitcom All in the Family, has no expertise or insight as a political commentator beyond a rabid hatred of his political opponents. But he appears frequently on the Trump-phobic, racist MSNBC network to deliver his deranged diatribes.
When Donald Trump stunned Hollywood by denying their conspiracy-mongering icon Hillary Clinton a White House win in 2016, he triggered a tsunami of celebrity bile like Reiner’s. For the next four years and beyond, Hollywood elitists vented their rage at Trump, at the 63 million Americans who voted for him in 2016, and the 74 million who voted for him in 2020, smearing them as “white supremacists” and “deplorables.”
Given the media power of these celebrity elitists, an antidote exists in reprising the vile opinions of the 20 worst of these hate-mongers, and including them in one foul list. Below are the bottom five celebrities on the list, with the others to follow in three more future posts of five more celebrities each.
The 20 Dumbest Hollywood Hatemongers
Tier 4: 20-16
20. Jane Fonda
“If you understood what communism was,
you would hope, you would pray on your knees
that we would someday become communist.”
Jane Fonda, 84, is and always has been one of Hollywood’s most shallow, cringeworthy luminaries. Born into Hollywood royalty, the daughter of Henry Fonda has had a long and highly successful acting career, with seven Academy Award nominations and two Oscar wins for such films as Cat Ballou, Barefoot in the Park, Klute, Coming Home, and On Golden Pond – not to mention her lucrative side gig as the star and producer of exercise videos and books.
Despite her wealth and privilege, as early as 1970 she was telling American college students: “If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would someday become communist... I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to communism.”[7]
In the summer of 1972 Fonda made her infamous trip to North Vietnam, a communist dictatorship with whom the United States was at war. The purpose of her trip was to volunteer herself as an enemy propaganda prop, denying that American POWs were being tortured – they were – and posing for pictures on an anti-aircraft gun that had been used to shoot down American planes (see photo above). To ice this treasonous cake, she made radio addresses urging South Vietnamese soldiers to desert and warning American troops that they were participating in war crimes.[8]
Declaring herself “a revolutionary woman” whose biggest regret was “I never got to fuck Che Guevara,”[9] Fonda continued over the decades to openly support every far-left cause from abortion on demand and gun control to Black Lives Matter and environmentalism. She married the Machiavellian, anti-American leader of the left, Tom Hayden, who advocated forming armed “liberated zones” in the United States to achieve the Communist fantasy she had promoted. Together they led the street radicals who had attempted to burn America down in the Sixties into the Democrat Party during the 1972 McGovern campaign, which set the stage for its transformation into an anti-American, totalitarian enemy within.
In 2016, Fonda was one of dozens of celebrities and activists who campaigned against soon-to-be-President Donald Trump, claiming that he represented
a grave threat to democracy, freedom, human rights, equality, and the welfare of the country. We have witnessed Trump inciting hatred against Muslims, immigrants, women, the disabled. We have seen him evidencing dangerous tendencies that threaten the bedrock of democracy: unleashing a lynch mob mentality against protesters, calling for the expulsion of Muslims from the country, bullying, and fear-mongering. History has shown us what happens when people refuse to stand against hate-filled leaders.[10]
Asked in an October 2017 interview if she was proud of her country, she immediately answered “No,” clarifying that she was “proud of the resistance. I’m proud of the people who are turning out in unprecedented numbers and continue over and over and over again to protest what Trump is doing.”[11]
In a November 2018 interview with Variety, Fonda warned that Trump was a Nazi on the rise: “If you have read anything about the rise of the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler you will see the parallels.”[12] Hysterical nonsense, but equating President Trump with history’s most notorious monster was the narrative the Left decided to run with.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama, who became “proud” of her country only when her husband was elected president, praised Fonda as a “politically savvy role model.”[13] The purported comedian Stephen Colbert gushed that she is “an icon of her generation.”[14] Michael Moore honored her with a Lifetime Achievement Award for her activism.[15] Ever the actress, she had scripted her life as a kitsch melodrama, in which she played a “revolutionary” who couldn’t tell the difference between a Trotskyite and an Uzbek.
19. Sean Penn
Actor Sean Penn, 61, has been a longtime radical activist in a variety of causes, often taking roles that were vehicles for his radical agendas. He has also buddied up with the most sadistic communist tyrants of the Western hemisphere. After Raul Castro replaced his brother Fidel as president of Cuba, Penn, who had previously met Fidel on at least one occasion, traveled to Havana for a friendly visit.[16]
He developed an even closer relationship with the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez, whom he called “a warm and friendly man with a robust sense of humor (who daily risks his own life for his country in ways Dick Cheney could never imagine). To treat such a man coldly is akin to spitting on him. As a country we’ve done enough of that.”[17] He subsequently suggested that anyone who referred to Chavez as a dictator should be incarcerated[18] – an indication that the dictator’s views along with his charisma had rubbed off on him.
As Chavez battled cancer in December 2012, Penn hailed him as “one of the most important forces we’ve had on this planet.”[19] After the dictator’s death a few months later, Penn wept and said, “Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion. I lost a friend I was blessed to have.”[20]
That “friend” of the United States was a man who supported and fomented anti-American terrorism around the world, from his own Cuba-trained private militia to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to al Qaeda. He had close ties with Cuba, China and Russia, and “cooperation agreements” with Libya, Iraq, and Iran. Indeed, he was awarded Iran’s Islamic Republic Medal for supporting Tehran’s ambition to develop its nuclear program. “Let’s save the human race, let’s finish off the U.S. empire,” Chavez said on that occasion.[21] As a “champion” of the poor people of the world, Chavez’s socialist policies steered the oil-wealthy nation of Venezuela into severe economic crisis, with food shortages[22] eventually leading to such desperate hunger that people hunted stray dogs in the streets. Chavez, by contrast, died with an estimated personal net worth of between $1 billion and $2 billion.[23] This is the “friend” Sean Penn was “blessed to have.”
By contrast, Penn has denounced a number of conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Dick Cheney and Bill O’Reilly, claiming without evidence that they “effectively hate the principles upon which we [the United States] were founded.”[24] In an October 2011 appearance on CNN, Penn characterized the Tea Party movement for limited government as a racist menace whose objective was to “lynch” then-President Obama, dubbing it “The ‘Get the N-Word Out of the White House Party.’”[25]
In an op-ed for Time in 2018, he blasted Trump as an “enemy of mankind” and “enemy of the state.”[26] In 2020 he labeled Republicans “the party of Putin.”[27] The following year at the Cannes Film Festival he told the audience the Trump administration’s coronavirus policies were no better than “gunning down” vulnerable communities “from a turret at the White House.”[28]
In a January 13, 2021 tweet, Penn likened former President Trump to the dead terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden, and Trump’s supporters to the Islamic terror group al-Qaeda.[29] That same month he also urged Trump to swallow cyanide capsules.[30]
As for his critics, Penn once told CBS News’ Sunday Morning that he hopes they “die screaming of rectal cancer.”[31]
18. George Takei
The ex-Star Trek navigator “Sulu,” 85, has carved a second career out of snarky political soundbites and LGBT activism in the media and on Twitter. He has smeared black Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a “clown in blackface,”[32] compared the “barbaric” enforcement of U.S. border security to “slavery,”[33] declared that police shootings of black suspects happen because officers “are afraid of black men,”[34] and called Trump “not only the stupidest, most incompetent president ever, but also the cruelest and pettiest.”[35]
Just prior to Trump’s 2016 election victory, Takei joined other Star Trek personalities in signing an open letter warning that a Trump election “would take this country backward, perhaps disastrously.” The letter characterized the candidate as “an amateur with a contemptuous ignorance of national laws and international realities.”[36]
Unsurprisingly, American voters were not swayed by this fear-mongering from the Hollywood privileged, and they voted Trump into office. Takei and his fellow Progressives then proceeded to invent the demonstrably false narrative that Trump and his administration were bigots and racists. Takei responded to Trump’s first major address to Congress in March 2017, for example, by tweeting, “You can't be ‘a country united against hate’ when your AG is a racist, your VP attacks LGBTs, and your top advisor is a White Nationalist.”[37] In fact, AG Jeff Sessions actually prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan and de-segregated Alabama’s schools, while VP Mike Pence, who was then governor of Indiana, praised Pete Buttigieg for his achievements as mayor of South Bend on the occasion of Buttigieg’s announcement that he was gay and his introduction to the public of his gay husband.
In December 2019 Takei tweeted a sweeping condemnation of Trump supporters as enemies of America: “The thing about Trump voters is that they do not even realize they are enabling the desolation of our Republic. They somehow think they are preserving America, but in fact they are helping destroy it. And that is a tragedy of enormous scope.”[38]
In November 2020, as white teenager Kyle Rittenhouse faced charges for shooting three white rioters with criminal records who attacked him in Kenosha, Wisconsin – charges of which Rittenhouse was later justifiably acquitted – Takei and other Hollywood virtue-signalers approvingly re-tweeted a morally-bankrupt message from United Nations diplomat Mohamad Safa which read, “I want to live in a country where Colin Kaepernick [a cop-hating communist] is seen as a hero and Kyle Rittenhouse is seen as a terrorist.”[39]
17. John Cusack
Cusack is famous mostly for roles in such 1980s and ‘90s films as Sixteen Candles, Say Anything, and Grosse Point Blank. A Bernie Sanders supporter and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Cusack is becoming equally well-known for rabidly angry, illiterate social media posts in which he excoriates the GOP as “a fucking deathkkkult,”[40] and claims that a third of the country is “Nazis.”[41]
“Let’s call the USA what it is,” he tweeted once, “– decadent on the fast track to autocracy – living on the atavistic fumes of the WWII greatest generation that actually took on fascism and beat it down – We can’t even arrest open criminals in the GOP - nor a mentally ill white supremacist lawless thug. We aren’t great – we aren’t even mediocre – we’re fucking awful – full of cowards and corporate whores.”[42]
Cusack naturally compares Trump to Hitler, accusing him of being a fascist who needed to be locked up in order for democracy to survive. “Fuck that pathological liar /criminal,”[43] Cusack tweeted. In August 2020 Cusack ranted, “Trump is basically a test run for true evil: the anti-Christ for dummies. The gods saying We’re going to give you a version so obvious with such Unimaginable Stupidity & abject cretinism & sloth – to show how decadent & empty yr culture & institutions have become – change.”[44]
As violent insurrectionary race riots raged across the country in 2020, Cusack took to social media to encourage the criminals to keep up the chaos until Trump was driven from the White House. “I hope this keeps us till trump flys away in a fucking helicopter — it’s time. People should NOT swallow another moment of fascism. Fight till he’s gone.”[45]
As Trump’s White House run wound down in 2020, Cusack declared on Twitter that the only supporters Trump had left were “rascists” [sic].[46] When the crowd at a 2019 Chicago Cubs game stood for a military tribute, Cusack remained firmly seated and later on Twitter blasted the standing crowd as “Flag sucking halfwits – maga deathkkkult freaks.”[47]
16. Rosanna Arquette
Actress Arquette, 62, has been known since the early ‘80s for films such as Desperately Seeking Susan, Pulp Fiction, and Crash, but today she is more prominent as a raging social media enemy of Donald Trump and Republicans in general.
In 2019 she lamented on Twitter: “It’s hard to wake up this morning and realize we are living under a sick dictatorship, that we now have a government that has normalized racism rape, mass killings from Guns Pedophilia, homophobia, the destruction of our environment. This government has normalized stupidity.”[48]
Also that year Arquette tweeted her disgust with American law enforcement and other authorities: “Kkk spent years hiding behind their hoods. Now they are front [and] center for the world to see. Nazi White supremacists are many governors, people in Congress, our police force, military, in entertainment news. We see you and you won’t get away with it.”[49] A couple of months later she stated, “If Jesus were alive today he’d be murdered by police officers because of the color of his skin.”[50] Fact check: Jesus was not a black man who resisted arrest, and there is no Justice Department statistic that supports the claim that police target blacks for their skin color – not even Justice Department statistics compiled under Barack Obama’s attorneys general.
After a shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in mid-2019, Arquette trotted out her own self-hating racism to falsely proclaim, “All of the shooters in America have been White males. White terrorists. The end.”[51] In fact, half the homicides in the U.S. are regularly committed by black males who constitute 6% of the population. Continuing the theme of her deranged racist obsession, Arquette announced later that year that she deeply regrets the immutable characteristic of her skin color: “I’m sorry I was born white and privileged. It disgusts me. And I feel so much shame.”[52] This is her attitude towards a country whose black population is the most affluent, privileged, and freest black population on the planet, including all of black Africa and the West Indies.
She feels shame not only for herself as a white person but for her country too – the one that made her rich and famous and gave her the freedom to express her loathing for it. “I don’t know about you but if the flag and star-spangled banner comes around me I kneel in solidarity and will for the rest of my life,” she vowed in June 2021.[53] That solidarity was for the America-hating, cop-defaming racist Colin Kaepernick and his national anthem-protesting comrades.
That same year Arquette stated, for no discernable reason, “Yes, it’s clear the R in Republican stands for Racist,”[54] and she reiterated that bigoted sentiment a month later, labeling the GOP “the Nazi party.”[55] She also likened Republicans to the fundamentalist savages of the Taliban,[56] another of the Left’s frequent and unoriginal smears.
After teen Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted for shooting three white criminals who attacked him, an outraged Arquette tweeted, “Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer. The End.”[57] But the jury that actually heard the evidence concluded otherwise. The End.
Next: Tier 3, Celebrities 15-11.
*
David Horowitz is the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the bestselling author of I Can't Breathe: How a Racial Hoax is Killing America.
Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
*
Notes:
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/smith-reveals-open-marriage-jada-202820862.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski_sexual_abuse_case
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Cosby_sexual_assault_cases
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Weinstein_sexual_abuse_cases
[5] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-01-14-tm-24389-story.html
[6] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/transcript-ricky-gervais-golden-globes-2020-opening-monologue-1266516/#!
[7] https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/jane-fonda
[8] https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/jane-fonda
[9] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2033795/Jane-Fonda-said-biggest-regret-sleeping-Che-Guevara.html
[10] https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2016/01/20/celebrities-join-stop-hate-dump-trump-anti-donald-campaign/
[11] https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2017/10/16/jane-fonda-proud-america-today-no/
[12] https://variety.com/2018/scene/news/jane-fonda-compares-donald-trump-to-hitler-and-the-third-reich-1203018248/
[13] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hanoi-jane-is-michelle-obamas-role-model
[14] https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2015/12/26/colbert-to-jane-fonda-you-are-an-icon-of-your-generation/
[15] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/michael-moore-honor-jane-fonda-lifetime-achievement-award-1122083/#!
[16] https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/sean-penn
[17] https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/sean-penn
[18] http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/sean-penn-america-el-chapo/2016/01/11/id/709003/
[19] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/sean-penn-praises-chavez-he-is-one-of-the-most-important-forces-weve-had-on-this-planet
[20] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hugo-chavez-dead-sean-penn-426205
[21] https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/hugo-chavez
[22] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_in_Venezuela#
[23] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-socialist-from-chavez-to-castro-leaders-who-lived-the-high-life
[24] https://newsrealblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/hollywood-liberal-sean-penn-defends-chavez/
[25] http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/312829
[26] https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2018/01/13/sean-penn-trump-enemy-mankind
[27] https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2020/10/21/sean-penn-republican-leaders-are-the-party-of-putin/
[28] https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/sean-penn-compares-trump-covid-103738608.html
[29] https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2021/01/13/sean-penn-compares-trump-supporters-to-al-qaeda-says-trump-is-bin-laden/
[30] https://twitter.com/SeanPenn/status/1346536558837465093
[31] https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/sean-penn-hopes-critics-die-of-rectal-cancer
[32] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/george-takei-clarence-thomas-clown-in-blackface_n_7719110
[33] https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei/status/1143135582949916672
[34] https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2016/07/14/george-takei-police-shootings-happen-theyre-afraid-black-men/
[35] https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei/status/890203105962467333
[36] https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2016/09/29/j-j-abrams-george-takei-generations-star-trek-cast-crew-sign-anti-trump-letter/
[37] https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei/status/836764679124836352
[38] https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei/status/1211500399120834560
[39] https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2020/11/23/george-takei-i-want-to-live-in-a-country-where-kaepernick-is-seen-as-a-hero-and-kyle-rittenhouse-is-seen-as-a-terrorist/
[40] https://twitter.com/johncusack/status/1325258874375581701
[41] https://twitter.com/johncusack/status/1325253704174460930
[42] https://twitter.com/johncusack/status/1404927219282161670
[43] https://twitter.com/johncusack/status/1106409980595363841
[44] https://www.lifezette.com/2020/08/john-cusack-unravels-trumps-a-test-run-for-true-evil-the-anti-christ-for-dummies/
[45] https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/05/31/actor-john-cusack-claims-cops-attacked-him-says-he-hopes-riots-last-till-trump-flys-away-in-a-fking-helicopter-928169/
[46] https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/john-cusack-claims-military-abandoned-trump-remaining-supporters-racists
[47] https://www.dailywire.com/news/photo-shows-john-cusack-sitting-during-military-amanda-prestigiacomo
[48] https://twitter.com/RoArquette/status/1110519717880459264
[49] https://twitter.com/RoArquette/status/1375442419794145286
[50] https://twitter.com/RoArquette/status/1390011327502983171
[51] https://twitter.com/RoArquette/status/1155726430082359296
[52] https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/rosanna-arquette-white-privileged-tweet-180949204.html
[53] https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/rosanna-arquette-kneel-national-anthem-american-flag-protest
[54] https://twitter.com/RoArquette/status/1382385824856121346
[55] https://twitter.com/RoArquette/status/1392500357041848320
[56] https://www.dailywire.com/news/rosanna-arquette-compares-republicans-to-taliban
[57] https://twitter.com/RoArquette/status/1458463104732254216
From FrontPage Mag, 5/23/22
