George and Amal Clooney announced their donation on Tuesday of $500,000 to the #MarchForOurLives (MFOL) initiative. Oprah Winfrey’s $500,000 donation followed quickly on its heels — and shortly after that, Jeffrey Katzenberg (the DreamWorks co-founder) and Steven Spielberg donated $500,000 each, bringing Tuesday’s celebrity-based MFOL funding to about $2 million and counting.
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The March For Our Lives initiative was started by Cameron Kasky, a student survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Kasky created the GoFundMe page for the MFOL movement on February 18, and the page indicates this with respect to how the donated funds will be used:
“The funds will be spent on the incredibly difficult and expensive process that is organzing [sic] a march like this. We have people making more specific plans, but for now know that this is for the march and everything left over will be going to the victims’ funds.”
The fund stands at $1,141,194 as of Tuesday night (and apparently does not include the $2 million in donations announced today by Clooney, Spielberg, Katzenberg and Winfrey).
Civil rights attorney and RNC committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon joined actor-turned-GOP congressional candidate Antonio Sabato Jr. and Princeton University professor Lauren Wright Tuesday night on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” to unpack the most recent developments in terms of celebrities entering the political arena.
“[Clooney] has been sniffing around politics for 20-plus years,” host Laura Ingraham said of the recent speculation that the actor has presidential aspirations. “In 2016, he raised $15 million in one weekend — that’s pretty good — for Hillary Clinton and other Democrats.”
The “nirvana” that Hollywood experienced during Obama’s two terms, Ingraham suggested, was ripped away following Trump’s unexpected and unwelcome win in 2016. Obama “echoed their world view,” she said. But when Hollywood failed to get Clinton elected despite huge investments of time, talent, and treasure, they were “embarrassed and furious.”
“Most of the entertainment and sports ‘in crowd’ see Trump supporters as either ignorant, racist, or Bible-thumping fanatics,” noted Ingraham.
“If too heavily infected by politics, sports, stage, and screen kind of become like everything else in Washington — nasty and polarizing.”
“If you really want to get into the political arena, really, you can’t just talk to your fans or even write a check. You need to be daring enough to go into unfamiliar and even hostile territory and answer tough questions.”
“Are you really going to go out there and talk about the issues we’re dealing with, especially in California?” asked actor-turned-GOP-congressional-candidate Antonio Sabato Jr., referencing Jennifer Lawrence’s announcement that she plans to join a nonpartisan group for a year as a political activist fighting corruption.
Related: Don’t Worry, Jennifer Lawrence Is Going to ‘Fix’ Democracy
“[Is Lawrence] just going to blame everything on the president, as usual?” he said, having noted California’s skyrocketing rate of homelessness, regulatory problems, high taxes, and other serious issues.
“Celebrities in Hollywood put all their chips on Clinton,” said civil rights attorney and RNC committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon. “They haven’t been able to cope very well, and when anyone challenges their worldview, they lash out with this incredible vitriol and bitterness,” she added. “It’s against conservatives, particularly conservative women, who speak up on behalf of conservative values in this country.”
She also theorized that some Hollywood types who involve themselves in politics may do so as a way of atoning for the violence and negativity they’ve participated in perpetrating against society.
“We need to have people in Hollywood who are going to stand up for the Constitution … stand up for the great laws we have in this country, and not for themselves,” said Sabato.
“Celebrities are not going to save democracy,” said Princeton University professor Lauren Wright, who is writing a book on the matter. She noted that the Founding Fathers were concerned about the possibility that electing leaders based on popularity and fame could have a negative impact on our fledgling constitutional republic. Regarding celebrities, Wright said, “They’re masters at garnering support on their own behalf, but not so good, as we can see from the research we have, at advocating for other people.”
“We need to have people in Hollywood who are going to stand up for the Constitution … stand up for the great laws we have in this country, and not for themselves,” said Sabato.
“We need to look for leaders who are more substantative,” Dhillon concluded.
In addition to sizable monetary donations, scads of celebrities, primarily those with a liberal bent, have been weighing in verbally and in other ways on political matters in the aftermath of the tragic school shooting in Florida.
Related: Trump Strikes Back at Oprah’s ‘Biased and Slanted’ Interview
Jennifer Lawrence says she’s planning to give up a year of her life to “fix our democracy.” The Oscar-winning “Hunger Games” starlet is an outspoken opponent of President Trump. Despite her obviously liberal personal feelings, she has assured fans her proposed political activism will not be partisan. Rather, it will focus on “trying to get young people engaged politically on a local level,” she said in an interview with Entertainment Tonight.
Lawrence might want to brush up a bit on Government 101 before taking on this self-imposed, herculean task. Given that the United States is a constitutional republic rather than a democracy, this could be a tall order.
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Michele Blood is a Flemington, New Jersey-based freelance writer and regular contributor to LifeZette.
(photo credit, homepage image: George Clooney and Amal Clooney, CC BY 2.0, by Glyn Lowe)
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