Variety has extended their “Actors on Actors” series to Broadway, so “theater actors” are sitting down for one-on-one conversations too. They put George Clooney with Patti LuPone. LuPone is one of the greatest musical-theater actresses of all time – Clooney is an idiot with a bad dye job. Guess which one spoke more? You guessed it. Most of the conversation was about acting, how much the world has changed over the years, how much Clooney respects LuPone and more. They eventually talk about modern politics when Clooney brings up Elon Musk in the middle of a larger speech about “how we should all try to get along and find common ground with each other.” It’s pretty tough to find common ground with violent racists, misogynists and fascists who chose to vote for all of what’s happening, but sure. Here are the Clooney quotes getting the most attention:
Clooney on Elon Musk’s Nazi salute: “Now, people can look at Elon Musk doing his move and go, “That’s a Roman salute.” And maybe it is. We put it on a big screen, and we let you make your own decisions. Having said that, I will argue that when you retweet a statement that says that Hitler wasn’t responsible for the Holocaust — which he did — then maybe it is a Nazi salute. Maybe.
Clooney on how we’ll all be okay: “Well, the president of the United States sent some nice tweets. It’s funny because he’s just a New York beast. We’ve all known him for 30 years, and he was just a guy chasing women. But whatever. It’s fine. We’re going to get through it… I’m an optimist.
We’ve been in worse places as a country: “You’ve been around long enough to remember 1968. Every city in the United States was on fire. We’d lost Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. We were losing the greatest speakers we’d ever had. The Vietnam War was raging, the Tet offensive, everything that was going on at that time in our country. The president basically resigned because Walter Cronkite said that Vietnam is unwinnable. We’ve been in much worse places. The only thing that’s different is the source of information and how much and how many different sources. It’s the only thing that’s different. But it’s not nearly as violent, even though it feels violent. It’s not nearly as hopeless as it was at that moment in time. And we’ve done this before. From President Jackson to McCarthy to this, the authoritarian, the demagogue, it goes away when they go away. And he will go away. They don’t have anybody that’s as charismatic as him. He’s charismatic. There’s no taking that away from him. He’s a television star. But eventually we’ll find our better angels. We have every other time.
We’ll get the House back next year: “If you’re a Democrat, we have to find some people to represent us better, who have a sense of humor and who have a sense of purpose. I think we’ll get the House back in a year and a half, and I think that’ll be a check and balance on power.
“We’ve been in much worse places. The only thing that’s different is the source of information and how much and how many different sources. It’s the only thing that’s different.” This is completely false – while the 1960s and ‘70s were difficult times for America, absolutely, the federal government still functioned at a fundamental level. We still had checks and balances and politicians still had a moral center – Nixon resigned because the Republican Party turned against him. LBJ chose not to run for reelection in 1968 largely because his party turned against him too. This happy horses-t of “we’ll all be fine after this” is Clooney’s audacious white male privilege – Trump is already sending immigrants to concentration camps in El Salvador, and he’s threatening to do the same to American citizens. People have died in plane crashes because Musk fired thousands of air-traffic controllers and plane-safety people. We’re headed towards a global recession, if not depression, this f–king year because of Trump’s moronic economic policies. The Supreme Court has been overrun by Christofascist lunatics who have largely cosigned everything Trump does.
We are actually in a historically awful period in this country, and it’s largely because people like Clooney didn’t put any political value in Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or the Biden administration. It’s repugnant that Clooney had all of that sh-t to say about Joe Biden and yet when it comes to Trump, Clooney is all “They don’t have anybody that’s as charismatic as him. He’s charismatic!” STFU.
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— lou patti thinker (@_christienism) April 22, 2025
Screencaps courtesy of Variety’s video.
