Liberal Matt Damon Targeted by Social Justice Warriors
The left eats its own.
Matt Damon has a big new movie coming out but he’s not winning any new fans from his fellow travelers on the left.
Damon has long been a favorite on the left for his progressive politics but two recent high profile incidents have put him at odds with the social justice crowd.
The Daily Beast’s culture reporter Kevin Fallon took Damon to the woodshed yesterday:
Shut Up, Matt Damon: The Actor Argues Gay Actors Should Stay in the Closet
In The Martian, Matt Damon plays an astronaut who is left behind on Mars. The entire world rallies around an effort to retrieve him and bring him safely back to Earth. Lately, we’d be just as happy to send Damon back.
The Oscar-winning actor’s career-long charm offensive came to a screeching halt this past week with two incredibly tone-deaf and woefully retrograde mini-scandals surrounding comments he’s made that were ill-advised at best—and bigoted at worst.
First was the ignorant dialogue about diversity in film on Project Greenlight. And now the most recent symptom of the most severe case of foot-in-mouth to plague an actor in years: an interview with The Guardian in which Damon posits that gay actors should stay in the closet if they want their careers to thrive.
Shut up, Matt Damon.
That pretty much covers Damon’s first crime: Heterosexual privilege.
The second one is even worse: White privilege.
Two weeks ago, the fourth season of Damon’s HBO reality series Project Greenlight premiered, and on it Damon is filmed making ignorant comments about diversity in film. The statements were all the more cringe-worthy as Damon essentially talked over a black female movie producer to make them.
The producer, Dear White People’s Effie Brown, was asking Damon and the room full of white filmmakers to consider the optics of hiring another white male to direct a film that whose only character of color was an abused black prostitute. Damon’s patronizing interruption in response to Brown’s concern wasn’t just rude—it exposed the problematic white privilege that continues to permeate Hollywood.
Here’s the exact moment from Project Greenlight mentioned above:
How far Matt Damon has fallen since the 2008 campaign, when he was praised by the left for questioning Sarah Palin’s intelligence. During an interview with the Associated Press, he claimed he wanted to know if Palin believed that dinosaurs existed 4,000 years ago.
Transcript via NewsBusters:
You do the actuary tables and there’s a one out of three chance, if not more, that McCain doesn’t survive his first term and it will be President Palin. And it really…we were talking about it earlier…it’s like a really bad Disney movie.
I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago, that’s an important…I want to know that. I really do. Because she’s going to have the nuclear codes. I want to know if she thinks dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago. Or if she banned books or tried to ban books. We can’t have that.
Here’s the video:
Like everything else liberals threw at Sarah Palin in 2008, these were complete lies. Palin never questioned the existence of dinosaurs or tried to ban books. These were just leftist talking points Damon picked up and then used his celebrity to propagate.
Have fun dealing with the leftist culture you helped create, Matt.
It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
Maybe this will constitute Matt Damon’s mugging.
Or he’ll fall in line, grovel, apologize, and “get right” with the Collective.
Hard to know, but interesting to watch. We live in “interesting” times.
It’s not necessarily straightforward for leftists to apologize to the left for missing a talking point. I’ve witnessed a number of cases where someone tries to apologize and gets condemned again because his/her apology was insufficient for the extreme leftists or didn’t quite use the right words. It can be quite a spectacle.
On the plus side, it can sometimes convince ideologues that their ideology is stupid. On the other hand, it usually just makes them sink deeper into a “self”-hating neurosis.
He’ll grovel, donate a ton of money to some left wing feel-good cause and be forgiven.
Damon’s Palin lie wasn’t just parroting talking points–her so-called theory was invented by a parody website called The Unbearable Bobness of Being. Maureen Dowd fell for it, too.
Hoo! Wow, ok!
Damon’s advice is sound. Being openly gay can hurt one’s chances to be cast in straight parts, especially in the dramatic parts that garner awards and fatter future paychecks. There just aren’t many lead parts for homosexual characters and that isn’t likely to change because the audience is overwhelmingly straight. There is a reason few openly homosexuals dramatic actors and actresses tend to come out of the closet, and then it is after they had established their ability to play sexually attractive straight characters. Casting directors know there is a large segment of the population that doesn’t fully wrap their heads around the idea of acting and thus they won’t find the idea of an openly gay man as a romantic heterosexual lead credible.
So it’s a gaffe under the classical definition: saying something true that must not be said.
Gandalf & Magneto would beg to differ. 🙂
Rupert Everett, however, agrees. In fact he made the same point about a year or so ago.
There is a long history of Hollywood leading men that also happened to be gay, and that tradition continues today, because it works. Making a big deal about your personal sex life really does not play well in most situations. Acting is no different.
People, who advise youngsters to shove their sex lives into other peoples’ faces, do not have the youngsters’ best interests in mind.
I recall when all gays stayed in the closet. Things sure seemed peaceful, but I suppose the gay population was suffering intolerably. The cycle will complete when the muslims take over.
Damon was correct about diversity in Hollywood. This short clip is way out of context. He was explaining that the characters in the movie should have diversity, but the cast in the show (Project Greenlight) is and should be based on merit.
If the best candidates for the show (we are talking about the crew and cast, not the characters) all happen to be white, so be it. If they happen to all be black, so be it. If they are diverse, then great. But ultimately the decision should be based on talent, not skin color.
“Maaatt Daaamon” – Team America
Social Justice continues its war on people and claims another victim. While it may have been largely self-inflicted, Damon deserves an opportunity to repent and recognize individual dignity, not class diversity.
“You do the actuary tables and there’s a one out of three chance, if not more, that McCain doesn’t survive his first term and it will be President Palin.”
So do republicans use this line on hitlery and the bern for the election?
1 in 3 chance, if not more, that hitlery doesn’t survive her first term.