It is no revelation that Hollywood leans Left, but this year’s Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards took that lean to the breaking point. The program, aired Sunday night, could have carried the subtitle, “Trump is bad (even though Obama did the same thing)."
Ashton Kutcher set the stage for the night’s remarks by other actors and actresses by opening the show with, “Good evening fellow SAG-AFTRA members and everyone at home, and everyone in airports that belong in my America.” It was a clear reference to Trump’s executive order to suspend the refugee progam, leaving many who had traveled to the United States from recently banned countries and were sitting in airports.
Of course, the America that Kutcher sees as his America does not likely include the people in “flyover country” that made him both rich and famous by watching his movies and television shows. Those states are populated by the people who would most likely be affected by terrorists coming into this country under an “open door” refugee policy. They are also the states that voted overwhelmingly for President Trump.
Kutcher went on to say, “You are a part of the fabric of who we are, and we love you, and we welcome you.” He was far from alone in his sentiment, or in his expression of that sentiment. Julia Louis-Dreyfus — most famous for playing Elaine on the long-running and iconic Seinfeld — used her moment on the stage after being announced Best Female Actor in a Comedy Series for her role on HBO’s comedy series Veep to say, “I am an American patriot. And I love this country. And because I love this country, I am horrified by its blemishes,” adding, “And this immigrant ban is a blemish, and it is un-American."
While accepting an award on behalf of the cast of the Netflix original Orange is the New Black, Taylor Schilling followed the evening’s format by stating, “We stand up here representing a diverse group of people — representing generations of families who have sought a better life here from places like Nigeria, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Ireland — and we know that it’s going to be up to us and all of you to keep telling stories that show what unites us is stronger than the forces that seek to divide us.”
Of course, the “diversity” that Schilling describes has no place for any dissenting opinion against the dogma of the Left.
Mahershala Ali spoke to the issue while accepting Best Supporting Actor for his role in Moonlight. Demonstrating the inability to separate scripted roles from reality so common in the Hollywood elite, Ali said, “What I’ve learned from working on Moonlight is you see what happens when you persecute people: they fold into themselves,” adding, “What I was so grateful about in having the opportunity to play Juan was playing a gentleman who saw a young man folding into himself as a result of the persecution of his community and taking that opportunity to uplift him and tell him that he mattered and tell him that it was OK and accept him, and I hope that we do a better job of that.”
Of course, what really stands out — though the liberal mainstream media (who jumped at the chance to report on the words of the Hollywood crowd as if they were something akin to received wisdom) failed to report it — is that the SAG Awards after President Obama signed into law the bill on which Trump’s suspension order rests was devoid of any critical remarks whatsoever.
As we reported Sunday:
Far from a “Muslim ban,” the order simply seeks a vetting process that would weed out those with “ties to terrorism.” And while the liberal establishment in both politics and media would spin it to say otherwise, there was little to no such reaction when their beloved President Obama did almost exactly the same thing.
In 2015, Obama signed H.R. 158, the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015. That bill clarified “the grounds for ineligibility for travel to the United States regarding terrorism risk, to expand the criteria by which a country may be removed from the Visa Waiver Program, to require the Secretary of Homeland Security to submit a report on strengthening the Electronic System for Travel Authorization to better secure the international borders of the United States and prevent terrorists and instruments of terrorism from entering the United States, and for other purposes.”
Chuck Schumer didn’t see the Statue of Liberty crying when Obama signed H.R. 158 into law. And the Huffington Post — which used “Holocaust Remembrance Day” to bolster its accusation that Trump’s new executive order “targets” both “Muslims” and “Refugees” — wrote at the time:
In what could be a sign the administration is moving away from a policy seen as discriminatory, the Obama administration announced Thursday that it is restricting visa-free travel to the U.S. for recent visitors to three additional countries — but not for dual nationals with those passports.
Under the new restrictions, citizens of the 38 countries that are part of the reciprocal visa-waiver program will lose their visa-free travel status if they have traveled to Libya, Somalia or Yemen within the past five years. Thursday’s announcement is an expansion of a law passed late last year, which revoked the visa-waiver status of people who had recently traveled to Iraq, Syria, Iran or Sudan, and who hold dual citizenship with any of those four countries.
So, when President Obama signed a bill to restrict travel to the United States by anyone from 38 countries (many of them Muslim-majority) if those persons had “traveled to Libya, Somalia or Yemen within the past five years,” he was “moving away from a policy seen as discriminatory.” Yet when President Trump suspends travel to the United States from seven countries, he is deemed guilty of discrimination. Only leftist doublethink allows for the acceptance of both these contrary conclusions. This is especially the case considering that the legal framework on which Trump’s executive order rests is the law signed by Obama and celebrated by the same people who now condemn its implementation.
Now, the spokespersons for the Left in Hollywood are doing exactly what their counterparts in both politics and the media are doing: condemning Trump for the very thing for which they praised Obama.
The lesson: Hollywood is not protesting the executive order; it is protesting Trump for the sake of protesting Trump. The people who have made their fortunes and gained their fame by the patronage of the inhabitants of “flyover country” are — once again — showing that they are completely disconnected from reality and devoid of principle.
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