When I set out to spend a year investigating the hypocrisies of the Hollywood left, I never imagined I would end up having my camera smashed and being challenged to a fistfight for asking Chris Rock why he calls the tea party racist. But the hatefulness and rage of Rock pales in comparison to what my research uncovered about many of his and Obama’s pals.
We can start with probably the number one race-baiting Obama worshiper, none other than Spike Lee.
After all, it was at Lee’s party at the Sundance Film Festival that Chris Rock became unhinged with me. As I explain in “Hollywood Hypocrites: The Devastating Truth About Obama’s Biggest Backers,” Lee campaigned hard for Obama in 2008 on the grounds that the community organizer would bring racial unity and spark a sense of togetherness heretofore unseen in American history. Proving that the man never met a slavery metaphor he didn’t like, Lee saw Obama’s triumph in the Democrat primary as a chance to move beyond “Massuh Clinton.”
As Spike put it, “These old black politicians say, ‘Ooh, Massuh Clinton was good to us, massuh hired a lot of us, massuh was good! Hoo! Charlie Rangel, David Dinkins — they have to understand this is a new day.”
But Lee, who fancies himself a champion of black folks, makes it clear that he believes black identity and radical progressive politics are twinned. He has no use for the historic contributions and achievements of black Americans like General Colin Powell and Justice Clarence Thomas. “They think like whites,” said the racist director. “There’s a difference between having a black skin and black thinking.”
American actors Ving Rhames and Cuba Gooding Jr., well, they behave in a “servile” way. And Tyler Perry, his movies are just “coonery and buffoonery,” claims the racist filmmaker.
He’s also lashed out at five-time Oscar-winning director Clint Eastwood for not rewriting history (like Lee does in his films) by including more black actors in Eastwood’s two Iwo Jima movies, “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.” The first movie was about the U.S. Marines who raised the American flag at Mount Suribachi, none of whom were black. And the second film was told from the perspective of the Japanese forces, a military that wasn’t made up of black soldiers.
In characteristic badass style, Eastwood said Lee should just “shut his face.” In characteristic ass clown style, Lee played — you guessed it — the race card: “The man [Eastwood] is not my father, and we’re not on a plantation. … He sounds like an angry old man.”
But I guess we should be thankful that Spike Lee’s racist rhetoric has at least matured over the years. He’s no longer talking about “pick[ing] up a gun and [shoot]ing whites,” as he told London’s Guardian newspaper in the early 1990s.
What’s troubling is that our president, the man who is supposed to treat Americans equally regardless of race, sees no problem associating himself with a Hollywood hatemonger like Spike Lee. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that Spike has the ability to raise over $1 million for his re-election campaign in one night.
It was in January that Lee hosted a star-studded event for the president in Manhattan that cost attendees up to $38,000 a plate and helped Team Obama rake in $1.6 million altogether. “POTUS Is Finishing Answering Questions To The Folks Who Wrote A Big Check,” Lee tweeted. “People Are Fired Up. We Have To Put On The Grind For 4 More Years.”
And grind on the Hollywood left will. That is, unless conservatives arm themselves with the factual ammunition that exposes the Hollywood elite’s hypocrisies and reveals that not even they live by the very policies they seek to inflict on us.
Obama backers like Spike Lee and Chris Rock must be confronted and challenged at every turn. If conservatives don’t take the fight to them, they will ram another four more years of Obama down our throats.
It’s time we arm ourselves with the facts and fight back.
Jason Mattera is the author of the brand-new book “Hollywood Hypocrites: The Devastating Truth About Obama’s Biggest Backers” (Simon & Schuster, March 2012).