Art and politics have clashed once again — and a prominent liberal Hollywood elite is at the center of a new situation, aiming his ire at (of course) President Donald Trump.

Calling out the latest nonsense from Spike Lee on “The Ingraham Angle” Tuesday night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham said, “America was built on this crazy idea of liberty and freedom. We’re all flawed. We’ve had flaws in our history. But America is built on this amazing idea of freedom.”

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Ingraham was countering one of the many controversial statements Spike Lee made at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, including his remark that the United States “was built upon the genocide of native people and slavery.”

Civil rights attorney Leo Terrell, a guest on “The Ingraham Angle,” said, “[Spike Lee] is absolutely right about the historical shame of blacks being considered property when this country was created … Blacks were not free when this country was created.”

The conversation quickly became heated.

Said Kevin Jackson, a Fox News contributor, to Terrell, “Spike Lee, like you, is an ethnocentric racist. You want to paint Donald Trump as a racist. And it doesn’t matter what he does. You’re gonna say he’s racist because you’ve been trained to be that. You’ve been trained to say that.”

“I bet [Spike Lee and President Donald Trump] could actually work together,” said Ingraham. “Instead, they’re separated by misconceptions and mistakes, probably on both sides … We can have compromise and actually work together.”

Lee does not just yet appear eager for a kumbaya moment.

Though much of his profane rant is too raunchy to print, liberal outlets didn’t let that stop them from endless digital drooling over his anti-Trump remarks at the 71st annual Cannes Film Festival. Coverage of the foul monologue rivaled that of the actual film the American actor and director was screening at the competition, “BlacKkKlansman.”

He doubled down on his hatred of the sitting president, repeatedly referring to the commander-in-chief as “Agent Orange” in a Tuesday morning interview after Monday night’s film premiere, Vanity Fair reported.

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The controversial film is based on a true story that “ties ’70s to Charlottesville,” as Showbiz411 reported. Starring John David Washington (Denzel Washington’s son) and Adam Driver, “BlacKkKlansman” met with a standing ovation at the festival. It is the story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer who infiltrated the KKK in ’70s-era Colorado.

The award-winning filmmaker seemed particularly fixated on the horrific incident in Charlottesville, during which Heather Heyer lost her life in August of 2017. After receiving permission from the victim’s mother, Lee included footage of the event in the film, multiple outlets reported. Its inclusion is meant to demonstrate that racism still exists today, apparently amplified and ameliorated — in Spike Lee’s mind, at least — by Trump’s presidency.

Related: A Tale of Two Cities: Charlottesville and Houston

Lee indicated that he holds Trump responsible for the Charlottesville horrors at some level, saying, “And with this Agent Orange in the White House, he’s allowed these people [neo-Nazis and members of the Alt-Right] to come out of the woodwork, out of the darkness, into the light,”  he told Vanity Fair.

Lee also referred to a statement by President Trump mentioning “very fine people on both sides.” The president said those words following the tragic incident in Charlottesville, in which James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a group of rally attendees, killing Heyer and injuring at least 19 more. Lee interpreted Trump’s words as praise for Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

“The decision to remove the statue provoked a small protest by Ku Klux Klan members at the same location in July, though no known Klan members appeared at Saturday’s [Aug. 12, 2017] rally,” MassLive reported.

Yet what Lee never referenced is that President Trump said at the time, “You had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally …”

“We all live on this planet, and this guy in the White House has the nuclear code …”

Trump was referring to a peaceful contingent of protesters who were in Charlottesville to oppose the removal of a historical statue of Robert E. Lee from the city’s Emancipation Park. There were also, clearly, substantial numbers of violent protesters and counterprotesters, including white nationalists and other groups among the rally attendees.

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Nonetheless, Lee’s disdain for Trump, in part, seems driven by his assessment that Trump’s condemnation of racists and racism in the wake of Charlottesville was insufficiently persuasive.

In a press conference at the festival, Lee said, “This right-wing [expletive] is not just America. It’s all over the world. And we have to wake up … We can’t be silent. It’s not black, white, or brown. It’s everybody. We all live on this planet, and this guy in the White House has the nuclear code. I go to bed thinking about it,” according to The Hill.

Michele Blood is a Flemington, New Jersey-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to LifeZette.

(photo credit, homepage and article images: Spike Lee [1], [2], CC BY-SA 3.0, by José Cruz/ABr)