Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey said the coronavirus pandemic should not be a partisan issue.
McConaughey appeared Tuesday on Fox News, where he spoke about a one-minute public service announcement he released urging the United States not to fall prey to political partisanship as the country attempts to combat and reemerge from the health crisis.
“About a month ago, I could feel this united purpose that we all have as Americans to beat this enemy and this virus, that purpose got hijacked a bit by partisan politics,” McConaughey said on Special Report with Bret Baier. “And all of the sudden, the narrative became, ‘If you want to go to work, you’re on the far-right. If you don’t want to go to work, and you want to stay home, you’re on the far-left.’”
“Now, even the mask-wearing is getting politicized. If you want to wear a mask … you’re liberal, and if you don’t, you’re a conservative. That’s just not true,” McConaughey said. “So this created a false divide, sort of two wars in America: An ‘us-versus-them war’ and an ‘us-versus-the-virus war.’ And if we try to fight both of those wars, we’re going to lose both of them. But if we try to fight the one against the virus, which is the one we should be fighting, then we’re gonna beat it.”
McConaughey compared the virus to World War II and said that the U.S. should work together to defeat the virus and be “united in that purpose.”
“We’re in this together,” the actor emphasized. “This is uncharted waters. There’s not a playbook.”
McConaughey also said that wearing a mask in public should not be a politically partisan issue and said he hoped that people would wear masks as “a badge of honor and not something that we feel like somebody told us we had to wear.”
