A “s—- ton” of celebrities, as actress Julianne Moore puts it, want you to vote on Nov. 8. Just not for Donald Trump.
Well, I think they’re referring to Trump, they don’t actually use his name. Maybe actor Don Cheadle is referring to Hillary Clinton when he says the celebrities came together to keep people from voting for “a racist, abusive coward who could permanently damage the fabric of our society.”
I’m only guessing that they’re referring to Trump because that’s how the media portrays him. Also, a little later into the video, the celebrities ask: “Do we really want to give nuclear weapons to a man whose signature move is firing things?”
This is supposed to be clever, I guess, but Trump doesn’t fire “things,” he fires people, from a reality TV show. How does that compare to nuclear weapons? At least be logical, people.
Part of the reason celebrities, the media and so many others hate Trump is because of his vulgarity and vitriol. Yet here we have celebrities, saying “s—- ton” and suggesting actor Mark Ruffalo will “have his d—- out” in his next movie. But hey, whatever.
Usually, if memory serves me correctly, celebrities do “rock the vote” ads but don’t specifically tell people who to vote or not vote for. I think we all remember the 2014 video from Lil’ Jon that featured celebrities explaining what issues they were going out to vote for in the midterm election (most of which were liberal causes) but there wasn’t an explicit mention of one party or the other.
Also not named in the video: Hillary Clinton. She’s not even described or posed as the alternative to Trump in the video. So these celebrities could be telling you to vote for anyone who’s running against Trump: Clinton, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, Sweet Meteor of Death, Cthulu. Who knows.
This video also comes at an inopportune time. On Wednesday, when the celebrity video was released, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote a scathing column about how political comics like Samantha Bee and Trevor Noah have created problems for the Democratic Party.
“First, within the liberal tent, they have dramatically raised expectations for just how far left our politics can move, while insulating many liberals from the harsh realities of political disagreement in a sprawling, 300-plus million person republic,” Douthat wrote. “Among millennials, especially, there’s a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.”
Further, Douthat wrote, this “cultural dominance” that the Left has “is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion — which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at every level of the country’s government.”
How are we supposed to “fight the man” when “the man” is a Democrat? By voting Republican.
This new star-studded video reeks of the cultural dominance to which Douthat was referring. We are being bombarded with people who are supposed to be our betters telling us what to do. People are getting tired of hearing people who act in movies tell them what to think. It’s becoming overkill.
They’re probably also getting tired of these dumb “completing-each-others’-sentences” types of videos.
It’s been done better.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
