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 ClosetIn 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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