Politics

Media watchdog to Meryl Streep: ‘Shut up and act’

StreepDuring her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award on Sunday, far-left actress Meryl Streep said she lost her mind “sometime earlier this year” and then proved it with a rambling, incoherent, sanctimonious rant apparently intended to attack Donald Trump.  Her diatribe prompted Newsbusters‘ Karen Townsend and Alexa Moutevelis Coombs to tell her in no uncertain terms: “Shut up and act.”

Here’s a transcript of her remarks, courtesy of Newsbusters:

I’ve lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend. And I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year. So I have to read. Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said. You and all of us in this room, really, belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it. Hollywood, foreigners, and the press. But who are we? And, you know, what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places.

I was born and raised and created in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a share cropper’s cabin in South Carolina, grew up in Central Falls, Long Island. Sarah Paulson was raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Italy. Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? [ Applause ] And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Ethiopia, raised in — no, in Ireland, I do believe. And she’s here nominated for playing a small town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is Canadian. And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, is here for playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. If you kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts. [ Cheers and applause ]

They gave me three seconds to say this. An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that, breathtaking, passionate work.

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There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it. I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modelled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. And the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose. Okay. Go on with that thing.

This brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage. [ Cheers and applause ] That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in our constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists. Because we’re going to need them going forward. And they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.

One more thing. Once when I was standing around on the set one day whining about something, we were going to work through supper, or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me, isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor. Yeah, it is. And we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be very proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight. [ Applause ] As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.

Here’s video of her speech, if you can stand it:

Naturally, her condescending remarks didn’t impress very many people outside the liberal Hollywood bubble:

https://twitter.com/greeneyes0084/status/818485152322043905

https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/818297924161601537

Townsend and Coombs noted:

Notice that she said Hollywood must protect journalists. She actually acknowledged the connection of journalists today and their Hollywood counterparts. The bubble is all encompassing in La La Land. She made it clear – Hollywood hates the very people who buy their movie tickets and watch their TV shows, the regular “deplorable” Americans.

Streep said, “An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like.” Hey, Meryl, shut up and act.

We agree.  Actually, we’d like it if she would just shut up.

And by the way, Meryl, Trump did not mock a reporter’s disability.

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Joe Newby

A 10-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Joe ran for a city council position in Riverside, Calif., in 1991 and managed successful campaigns for the Idaho state legislature. Co-author of "Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad," Joe wrote for Examiner.com from 2010 until it closed in 2016 and his work has been published at Newsbusters, Spokane Faith and Values and other sites. He now runs the Conservative Firing Line.

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